


World Comes Tumbling

by lady_ragnell



Series: Melt You Down [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, See notes for warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:44:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur Pendragon is working with a group of sorcerers that plan to take his father's company apart, but when a rescue attempt goes wrong and he's forced to go into hiding, he goes to a safehouse run by Merlin, the sorcerer who started his defection in the first place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World Comes Tumbling

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** For the plot: minor character death, references to imprisonment and unethical experimentation on humans, aftermath of both, and one battle scene. For the sex: barebacking, sex magic (fully consensual). As always, if I missed a warning, I apologize and please let me know.
> 
> Title from Muse's song "Resistance."

“You aren’t going to fuck this up.”

Arthur refuses to jump even though it’s late and he thought he was alone in the office. Instead, he takes a moment to look up from his screen to catch sight of Morgana, still dressed for work, leaning against his door. “Is that meant to be reassurance or a threat? No, wait, you must have dreamed it. Always good to have prophecy on my side.”

“I don’t need to use my talents to know this, Arthur.” He meets her eyes, a bit startled that she’s showing any faith in him at all. Most days Morgana rails against him as hard as she does against his father. “I knew you would be all right two years ago. It’s just taken a while for the others to come round, that’s all. Tonight’s the last hoop you have to jump through, I promise.”

“This is the first I’ve heard of it. You seemed quite skeptical of me at first.”

Morgana steps in and sits down at his extra chair. “Skeptical of how far along you were, maybe. Never of whether you’d get it in the end, though.”

“And what could I have possibly done to earn such faith?” He musters all the sarcasm he can and leans back in his chair. He knows when it was--of course he does, down to the exact date, maybe even the hour--but he isn’t sure exactly what impressed Morgana. Was it that he figured out she was the silent figure assisting the others? Was it that he’d waited before pulling an alarm far from where he knew the invaders were going? They’ve never really talked about it, beyond him saying he wants to help and her telling him to prove it.

“The first question you asked me that morning was whether Merlin and Freya were safe.” She smiles when he just blinks at her, a cat-that-got-the-cream smirk that puts him back on safer ground. “You could have shouted at me, since you recognized me, you could have told your father or the police, but the first words out of your mouth were asking after them.”

After Merlin, really, but he won’t say that to Morgana. She doesn’t know that the morning after a sleepless night of telling lies to security guards Arthur had rushed out to buy a paper for the answers the police wouldn’t give him, one of the pro-magic papers his father wouldn’t even use to burn, or how he sat in a coffee shop with his shoulders hunched to hide his face and saw a picture of Merlin with his arms wrapped around a girl, smiling and silly and not the dangerous creature with changeable eyes and a rough voice he’d held against his chest. The girl was his sister, the paper had explained, and he’d skimmed over phrases--”most powerful mage in Albion,” and “police found his home empty”--and wondered for the first time what was in the basement labs he’d never got to see. Merlin was always the important part. “So what do I have to do tonight? Presumably you’re here to tell me, and not working late. You aren’t wearing rescue clothes.”

“It’s too soon after Mordred. Uther thought the children’s ward was safe, so he’s raised security again.” Her mouth curls around the words “children’s ward” in a way that makes him sick, makes him think of hospitals, where things are supposed to be made better. “No, I’m here to give you a properly scrambled radio. We don’t trust mobiles,” she adds when he makes a face, and produces a radio from seemingly nowhere to hand to him. He takes it automatically. “You’ve talked to everyone you need to, but the safehouse staff needs to trust you as well. Just talk to them, and that’s all you need. On the radios we use codenames. You’ll be talking to the Dragon, he takes care of most of the communication the safehouse does--”

“I feel as if I’m in a spy film.”

“And he’ll be calling you Wart.”

Morgana smiles serenely and Arthur glares at her. “You swore never to tell anyone about that.”

“And I didn’t. I just used it as your pseudonym, that’s all. You can thank me later. He’ll be talking to you quite soon, so I’ll duck out. Text me whether it went well or not, after.” She stands to leave, then furrows her brow. “Just … don’t say anything stupid, Arthur.”

“I think I’ve been trained out of that in the last two years, don’t you?”

Her raised eyebrow means that’s far too easy an opening for her to take. “Think before you speak,” she says instead of insulting him, and ducks out.

Arthur is left in his dark office, knowing that he should probably get away from his father’s building before he answers a call from sorcerers trying to get the “volunteer test subjects” away from Pendragon Corp and shut down the company, but unwilling to go out on the street as well. Eventually he decides to trust the scrambled signal to keep the conversation from showing up on security footage and waits for the signal.

It takes fifteen minutes before the radio lets out a high-pitched beep, and Arthur immediately starts pressing buttons to make it stop. “Is that the Dragon?” he asks when he gets to slightly staticky silence, feeling foolish.

“Oh, fuck, fuck, how did _you_ get this radio?”

And suddenly it’s two years ago and there’s a voice whispering in his ear and a warm pulse under his hand, and Arthur gapes in silence before realizing that his communication is probably about to get cut off and send the whole organization into a panic. “No, hold on, wait, please, this is Wart. I’m Wart. I’m … I thought they would have warned you. M--Fay, I thought Fay would have told you.”

“But it’s you,” Merlin says, sounding a little lost. Arthur can sympathize. He’d never expected to hear another thing about Merlin, except in his wildest dreams, because anyone smart would be out of the country and in hiding. “It can’t be you.”

“It shouldn’t be you either,” says Arthur for the lack of anything better. “I thought you would be across the world. They’re still looking for you, it can’t be safe.”

“A safe house is the safest place to be. And I can protect myself.” Arthur remembers dust falling out of his gun, gold in Merlin’s eyes; his worry is useless, of course, but that doesn’t mean he can stop. “Why are you helping us, Wart?”

Morgause asked it in a tone of deep disinterest, like his answer didn’t matter. Gilli was belligerent. Alice was gentle but firm. None of them sounded like this, confused and helpless and soft, and if Arthur didn’t know better he would think Merlin is someone who needs protecting. “After that night,” he starts, and stops, because he doesn’t quite know how to say this the right way. “You told me to figure out what was going on,” he tries instead. “The next morning, after I realized that I knew who Fay was, I asked her, and she showed me. I’d thought--I’d been told, for so long--”

“That they were volunteers,” Merlin supplies. “That they wanted to be rid of their magic and that they would let Pendragon Corp do anything and everything to take it from them.”

“But of course it wasn’t true. I shouldn’t have believed someone who hates magic this much, but he sent me to schools where I wouldn’t meet the gifted and it never occurred to me to ask.” Arthur keeps his voice as even as he can. He still wakes from dreams sweaty and nauseous, remembering the labs Morgana had walked him through after hours while she whispered with those who still had wits enough to listen. “She showed me what they do, and it’s … I can’t believe what he’s done, in the name of …”

In the name of his mother, mostly, killed by magic mere days after his birth, experiments with magical fertility treatments gone wrong. “I know this,” whispers Merlin. “Why did you decide to change it?”

“Because anyone with any human decency would,” he snaps. “Nobody deserves to be driven mad like that.”

“I think that’s the right answer.”

Arthur blinks at the radio. “Why?”

“You wouldn’t hurt us. Not any longer.” He remembers his gun at Merlin’s head and feels a hot rush of shame. “I’ll contact headquarters in the morning. You’re safe as far as I’m concerned.”

Before Arthur can say anything else, ask any questions, he’s listening to the crackle of static and nothing else.  
*  
Merlin bends over the second he flips off the radio and presses his forehead to his knees, trying to get a proper breath.

It could be seconds or it could be minutes before Freya comes in. “Merlin? Merlin, are you all right?”

“Is Mordred in bed?”

She sits down across the table from him and he manages to sit up, still feeling like someone punched him in the gut. Arthur, Arthur Pendragon, on his radio saying he wants to help. He’s half-expecting to wake up any second because it can’t be real. Surely someone would have told him before. “He’s reading. He does insist on reading all those violent books, and he’s still not talking much. I worry about him.”

“He’s only been here a few weeks, and on top of having been there his parents _gave_ him to Pendragon. It will take a while.”

She looks at the radio. “Who was it? Bad news? You’re upset.”

“I just had a chat with the latest member to join the underground, and he’s safe. Wart, we’re supposed to call him.” That much Freya needs to know. The next part he probably shouldn’t say, but this is the safehouse. He’s drenched it in so much magic that phones don’t work, surveillance devices are useless, even magical eavesdropping, and he needs to say it to someone. “He’s Arthur Pendragon.”

Freya lets there be silence for a minute instead of asking if he’s sure, or if that was why he was upset, or one of a hundred other possible questions. “You trust him,” she says at last, no judgment in her tone.

That’s the important question, for them. Everyone in the underground is interrogated under truthspell before they get told anything big, but nobody joins unless they’re a hopeless idealist or a spy, and nobody thinks they’ll crack under bribes or torture or any of the other pressures Uther Pendragon can put on them. Those are the important things to know, and no spell can reveal that. Arthur Pendragon, though, won’t betray them. Merlin knows that with overwhelming and frightening certainty. “Fuck, I do. I shouldn’t. He held a gun to my head.”

He never told her the full story of that night, of telling Arthur to pull the trigger and filling him with magic and the look on his face when Merlin told him to wait. She knows enough, though, and she knows _him_. “He didn’t pull the alarm, though,” she says. “You’ve never sounded as if you dislike him, all the times we’ve talked about that night.”

“It’s not a matter of like or dislike. It’s that he’s Uther Pendragon’s son and there’s no way this won’t all end badly.”

“Then why did you give him the okay?”

Because he sounded like he was going to vomit at the thought of what went on in his facilities. Because when he said “human decency” he sounded like he meant it. Because two years ago, he held Merlin like he’d forgotten he was holding a gun as well. “I don’t know. I just trust him.”

“You’re shouting,” says Mordred in a high, flat voice from the door to the kitchen. Merlin starts; not many people can creep up on him, and he knows he and Freya were keeping their voices down. “In my head, you’re shouting.”

Merlin’s never been a mind-reader. That and seeing the future are the only two things he can’t do, when he’s being honest, so he isn’t quite sure what to do with Mordred’s wide, unblinking stare. Freya just sits there and lets out the shuddering breath that he recognizes from every time he’s around a mind-reader, while every secret she doesn’t want told rushes across her conscious mind. “We’re sorry, Mordred. Didn’t anyone train you to turn it off when you want to sleep or be private?” he says.

“I used to know how to turn it off, but I can’t anymore. They did something.”

They hear all kinds of stories, at the safehouse. The rescuers don’t usually talk much while they’re breaking people out, so Merlin and Freya are the first friendly faces some of these people have seen in years. Still, though, he doesn’t think he’s heard anything worse than a little boy telling him that he can’t get other people out of his head because of something Pendragon Corp did to him. “I can’t believe what he’s done,” Arthur said on the radio. Merlin is inclined to agree.

Freya stands and goes to Mordred, puts her arms around him. He doesn’t really react, but she’s whispering soothing things and probably thinking them as hard as she can as well, and hopefully that will help. Merlin’s well out of his depth with Mordred, and Freya is too, but they have to try their best until they find a family to take him in, one that can deal with a very powerful child. “I can ward your room,” he offers when Freya seems to run out of things to say. “Soak it in magic until you can’t hear anything outside it, and that way if you need to sleep or just want to be alone you can. And we’ll try to train your control back.”

“Unless whatever they did is permanent,” says Mordred, probably so he doesn’t have to worry about them thinking it. Merlin doesn’t think he could hate Uther Pendragon more than he does at this moment.

“We’ll fix it. We’ll make it better.”

“Could you ward my room?”

Freya steps aside, looking worn out and sad, and he squeezes her hand as he passes her. Hopefully she won’t disappear to her room while he’s helping Mordred. Mordred walks ahead of him down the hallway, and Merlin follows him into his room, which is still mostly bare of possessions, even though they’ve offered to get him anything he needs. “Let me know when you can’t hear Freya anymore, okay?” says Merlin when they get inside and shut the door.

Mordred just sits down on the bed, watching with wide eyes and leaving Merlin to wonder if he’s ever actually seen the kid blink. And then to apologize in his head because of course Mordred heard that. That done, he starts filling the room with magic, imagining runes for silence and protection blazing on the walls, and the world goes gold and a little too bright like it always does when he does big magic. “That’s enough,” says Mordred after nearly ten minutes, and Merlin lets go of the magic and has to brace himself against the wall while the world spins. It’s almost vibrating against his hand, a warm purr. Hopefully that will fade, or it will be distracting.

“We’ll make you a proximity alarm in the morning so you can still hear if anyone’s coming,” Merlin promises. “And we’ll work out a training schedule to get your shields back up, too. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep now?”

“I’ve got a book to read. Thank you.”

Merlin has no idea how a child that age can give such a clear dismissal, but he doesn’t question it. Instead, he waves an awkward goodnight and goes back to the kitchen, where Freya seems to be making tea. “Are you okay?” he asks.

“We aren’t set up to train a child, or even take care of one for long. Neither of us had training for mind-reading.”

“We’ll find him a family, Frey.” He boils the water with a look, just for something to do, even though she says it makes the tea taste different. “Just now we have to find him parents willing to deal with more than we’d thought before. I know what we can handle. Maybe the next person to come through will have the right skills to help. We’re bound to start getting more people with Wart’s access codes and not just Fay’s for getting into the wards.”

“And what will Pendragon’s reaction be when more and more people start escaping? He’ll change the security, or move the people.”

Freya’s twisting her hands, and Merlin grabs her wrist just to feel the pulse and remind them both that she’s safe. “We can’t fix it all at once. Morgause has told me that enough times. But they haven’t managed to pass a discrimination law since we broke you out, and we’re starting to get the children out. It will get better, yeah? We’ve got to believe that.”  
*  
In his first month working with Morgana and the other sorcerers, Arthur helps three people who came under his father’s scrutiny out of the city before they end up in one of his facilities and helps a rescue team with what they apparently call an “Emrys Decoy,” pulling an alarm for a supposed gas leak on the other side of the facility from whatever sorcerer they’re saving. He never finds out who it was he helped.

He knows it’s good work, and he’s not happier, precisely, but certainly more satisfied than he’s been with himself in two years. Still, Arthur feels as if everyone else is keeping him away from the sorcerers in case he decides to betray them after all. When he asks Morgana, she scoffs and says it’s because he doesn’t have enough experience yet, but he still wonders.

The first time he helps with a rescue, pressed against the wall of an alley with three other people waiting for a police car to drive by, he hears Merlin’s voice crackle across the radio and almost lunges to rip it out of Gilli’s hands. It’s just a routine check-in, Merlin letting them know that the room at the safehouse is ready even though the people from the city usually stay there less than a week, but his nervousness fades immediately and he makes a point of not asking himself why.

His father calls Arthur to his office six weeks after Merlin approves him, probably noticing that his son has been avoiding him more than usual. “You’ve seemed bored with your work lately, Arthur, and I’ve decided it’s time to give you more responsibility.”

“What do you mean, father?”

Uther Pendragon hasn’t made himself this powerful and successful by being a fool, no matter how often Morgana and Morgause call him one. Blind, yes, unyielding, of course, but not a fool. He knows Arthur’s an idealist, and he won’t show him the worst yet. He’ll work up to that. “I know that I’ve kept you from the R&D side of things since your degree was in Business Law and not the sciences, but you’ll have to know how everything works when you take the company over for me.”

“So you want me to visit the labs, or the dormitories?” Arthur keeps his voice as casual as he can manage.

“Eventually, but not yet. I do have something in mind for you, though it won’t have you working with the anti-sorcery work directly, at least not yet. I need someone to figure out where the hole in our security is and keep these ridiculous rescue groups from getting through. They’re giving us a bad name.”

Arthur nods instead of saying anything that he wishes he could. The hardest part about joining Morgana’s underground movement has been pretending that nothing has changed and that he still believes magic is evil (though he hasn’t even really had time to reconsider his stance on magic--he just knows that what his father does to sorcerers is worse than anything he’s heard of any of them doing outside of fairy tales). “I’ll audit security, see what kind of corners they’re cutting, and if they aren’t cutting any, I’ll see how the sorcerers are getting through spell-proofed doors.” Somehow without bringing Morgana’s codes into it.

His father looks pleased. Two years ago Arthur would have done anything for that proud almost-smile and the clap on his shoulder that comes next. “I’m sure you’ll do the job admirably, Arthur. I’ll get you the necessary security codes so you can see everything. Ask Morgana to give you to tour if you find yourself needing to go to the labs.”

“Thank you, Father.”

When he’s almost out of the office, his father calls him back. “Don’t tell too many people that you’re helping me with this, Arthur. I’m sure you can guess why.”

“Of course.”

The second Arthur’s out of the office that night, he calls Morgana on the cheap mobile he bought for underground calls and tells her everything his father told him. “It’s good that you’re still fooling him this well, and still better that you’ll have access codes that get you to more places without going in the records. You’ll be much more use in rescues, and there’s a matter I want to discuss with you soon about rescues that will take both of our codes and a lot of work. Not over the phone, though.”

“We’ll meet up and go for a drive this weekend, get out of the city. You can tell me then.” He pauses. “How do you go into those labs every day without going mad?”

“I just remind myself that we’ll get them out of there. It’s good that your father is trusting you more, even if it means you have to be on both sides at once. It means he’s going to retire someday, and the second he’s out of the company we’re going to take it apart brick by brick. Keep that in mind.” She sighs. “And now I’ve got to get dressed, he set me up on a blind date with yet another rich man without a single brain in his head. Take care, Wart.”

Before he can object to her using his childhood nickname outside the scrambled radio conferences when he’s forced to answer to it, Morgana hangs up her phone, leaving Arthur to spend another night fidgeting around his flat, wishing he was still interested in spending time with his uni and footie mates, the next generation of his father’s cronies. He still speaks with Leon, sometimes, but Leon’s far up the ranks in their legal department and Arthur doesn’t trust himself to lie to him. Instead of calling anyone, he turns on the telly and watches pundit after pundit on the news say that sorcerers should be forced to register with the government, something they’ve been saying in increasingly desperate tones for years now. He’s at least pleased that his father hasn’t managed that yet.

It’s a long couple of days before Saturday, when Arthur picks up Morgana (carrying what looks like a designer picnic basket) and drives them out of the city, far from anyone who would want to listen in on their conversations.

“What is it you wanted to tell me?” he asks when they’ve found a patch of mostly-dry ground in the sun to sit on and she’s staring at him over her cucumber sandwich.

“When we’ve been doing the rescues, we’ve of course been using the plans filed with security to see where everything is located and what sort of defenses we’ll have to get through.” Arthur nods; he knew that long before he was made a full member of the group. “The child we rescued, almost two months ago now, he’s a mind-reader. He said before we passed him on to Merlin that he heard people screaming from below him.”

“There’s no basement under the children’s ward,” Arthur says automatically, and realizes that he’s probably just proved whatever point Morgana is about to make.

“Morgause took some other mind-readers to the facility last weekend and had them scan for thoughts, with as much power as they could. There’s a hidden basement under the children’s ward. We could only detect four people down there, and we don’t know who they are yet, but that’s our next goal. Uther doesn’t want anyone to know about whoever’s down there and we want to take him down, so we’ve got to get them out.”

“It will have to be all of them at once or we’ll only get one,” says Arthur, half a week’s worth of looking through security files coming to mind. “If Father cares about them that much, enough to hide them on the building plans, then he’ll almost certainly move them to an even worse location the moment he’s got a hint that we can get in to them, or even kill them, unless they’re more valuable than the others. It isn’t like the others, where he can write it off as a night’s incompetence, or sorcerers being wily.”

Morgana leans back on the blanket, looking for all the world like they’re just having a friendly picnic. “Our first order of business will be to figure out who they are and why they’re down there. Then we’ll figure out how to get them out. It will be easier with both of our security codes, but it still might take a while.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“Morgause said we shouldn’t. She’s fine with having you help on the rescues but she’s worried on letting you in on the bigger things.” Morgana smirks, like they’re teenagers again and she’s got one over on him. “Merlin and I convinced her otherwise. He asked after you, you know.”

Arthur bites his sandwich instead of answering and pretends it’s the sun making his face pink.  
*  
“I’m going to town,” Merlin calls up the stairs one morning. “Gwaine says our latest supplies have come in down at the shop and I want to get them as soon as I can.”

Mordred appears in his doorway down the hall as Freya calls an acknowledgment from upstairs. “Gummi worms,” he says in that eerily solemn way he has. “For rewards when I manage to put shields up.”

“Right, we were going to start using candy for that.” After nearly two months with them, Mordred’s shields are starting to get better, but he can’t sustain them for long and sometimes they won’t work at all. The reward system is Freya’s idea, since she’s the one training him most of the time; Merlin seems to be spending half his time on the radio with Morgause and Fay, consulting about who or what is in the hidden basement at Pendragon Corp. “If you promise to meditate for at least twenty minutes while I’m gone, I’ll pick up some pancake mix as well and we can have a special dinner.”

Pancakes, they’ve learned, are the one thing guaranteed to make Mordred smile, so Mordred beams at him and Merlin smiles in return before pulling his jacket on and walking towards town.

Even though Gwaine doesn’t know for sure who they are or what they’re up to (though he’s got to suspect; everyone in Ealdor must suspect), he’s offered dozens of times to deliver their supplies straight to the house. Merlin trusts Gwaine, after two years in town, even if he does have a tendency to disappear for weeks at a time, but the supply runs are usually the only time he gets off the property. Freya doesn’t like leaving, still, but he needs to get away sometimes.

As always, when he leaves the magical shields that drench the safehouse, the air feels a little too thin, like he can’t quite breathe it. Merlin hates it. He grew up feeling the magic in every tree in the park, every person he passed, but now it’s all dulled down in comparison to the roaring blaze of the protections on his house. It’s hard to notice the little sparks and tingles he loved so much with that around.

It also makes it harder to sense people coming closer when he doesn’t have an active alarm spell going, which is why he jumps and nearly incinerates the person who comes at him from the side when he’s nearly in town and grips his arm. “Merlin?”

“Keep your voice down,” he snaps, on autopilot, and turns around to find Lancelot staring at him, shaken out of his usual serene calm. Merlin knows how he feels. He hasn’t seen Lancelot since university, and nobody new ever comes here anyway. “You’re up north,” he says, even though it’s demonstrably not true.

“My wife and I--her father--”

“Perhaps we ought to start this again.” Merlin walks a few steps back into the woods that separate the safehouse from the rest of the town and Lancelot follows, his hand still clenched in Merlin’s sleeve. They sit on a fallen tree and Merlin collects his thoughts. “You got married?” he asks at last, since that’s as good a place to start as any other.

“A few months before you disappeared.” Lancelot’s face lights up, and Merlin relaxes. He’s okay. There’s someone he cares about whose life isn’t in constant danger. “Her name is Gwen. I always wanted you to meet her, but we fell out of touch, and the ceremony was small, and then you went missing.” Merlin nods. “Her father lives in town here, and we’re visiting him, on a bit of a holiday.”

“What are you doing these days?” It’s more than a bit surreal to be having such a casual conversation with an old friend with his life as it is, but it’s steadying as well.

Lancelot shifts and glances down at his lap, which is never a sign of good news coming from him. “Gwen and I run an inn, on the Mercian border.” He pauses. “We started ferrying sorcerers through it last year. Her brother found out they were looking for people and he knew that I knew you, and Gwen’s known some sorcerers too …”

“I would tell you that you shouldn’t and it’s too dangerous, but--”

“But you’re doing the same thing, closer to the source,” Lancelot finishes, then stops. “Is Freya still with you? I wanted to get in touch when I heard she went to Pendragon Corp, but I didn’t know what I could say, much less what I could do.”

“Freya’s here, yeah. You can come to the house and see her once I’ve got my groceries, if you’d like. And Gwen, if she wants. I trust you, and you trust her.”

“We’d be glad to. Gwen said those first couple of months that I never shut up about you and everything we got up to at school.”

Merlin doesn’t allow himself to miss life outside the safehouse too often. He would give a lot more for Freya’s safety, and he knows he’s doing good work, but sitting next to Lancelot is reminding him of all the other friends he left behind without even warning them, and the fact that he was saving to go to a graduate program in psychology, and a hundred other things that he’s managed to tamp down. “I’ll bet you didn’t tell her about the time you fell off the roof and I had to save your arse,” he says when he knows he’s been silent for too long.

Of course Lancelot doesn’t treat it like the joke it’s meant to be. He gets serious instead. “Of course I told her how we got to be friends.”

“Gwaine’s expecting me at the shop,” Merlin blurts. He needs time to think. “Then I’ve got to warn Freya and our current guest to expect company, so if you and Gwen want to come for dinner, things should be ready by then. I’ll set the wards to let you in. Have you got anything of hers on you?”

Lancelot just looks at him for a bit too long, and Merlin wonders if he’s going to ask what’s wrong, a question Merlin was never able to resist answering when they knew each other better. Instead of asking, though, he takes a note out of his pocket and hands it to Merlin, who holds it without reading it for a few seconds to get a sense of her essence. It reminds him so much of his mother that he wants to keep it, but he hands it back instead. “We’re staying with Tom from the hardware store, if you need to get a message to us,” says Lancelot. “Otherwise we’ll come around seven.”

“Thanks.” He shakes Lancelot’s hand, horribly awkward when they used to hug every time they saw each other, and waves him off. “You should go first. I trust everyone in town, but just in case there are ever visitors who would turn me in I like to make sure no one can be linked to me.”

Years later, he still recognizes the face Lancelot makes, the thing halfway between pity and determination that means he wants to do something stupid and noble but isn’t sure what yet. “We’ll see you tonight, Merlin.”

Merlin just waves him off, and gives him five minutes before he goes into town and to the shop. Gwaine starts chatting immediately, as he always does, and Merlin does his best to answer while he accepts the boxes they’ve ordered and puts another few items on the top, including Mordred’s candy and pancake mix. Gwaine, after considering him while he pays, puts a six-pack of cider on top of the stack with a wink before sending him off with a bit less flirting than usual.

Freya and Mordred are in the living room when he gets back, meditating, and he puts the groceries away while they finish their lesson and then calls them into the kitchen. “Lancelot is in town,” he says, even though Mordred probably doesn’t need to hear it. “He and his wife are part of the movement, in a cell up north, and he wants to come for dinner tonight. Mordred, I trust him absolutely but if you aren’t comfortable I can ask him not to come.”

“He can come,” says Mordred. “Can we still have pancakes?”

“Anyone who doesn’t like pancakes is not welcome in our home.” Mordred nods, and Merlin looks up at Freya, who’s clutching the door frame like it’s the only thing holding her up. “That goes for you, too. Just because you met him a few times doesn’t mean you still trust him.”

“No, it’s just … weird, that’s all.” She closes her eyes. “Could you radio headquarters, though? Just to make sure?”

Like happens at least once a week, Merlin wants nothing more than to track Uther Pendragon and kill him, make him feel even a tenth of what his sister felt. He grips the table and breathes while the dishes rattle, and Freya looks at the floor like she always does when they come close to mentioning it.

“Me too,” says Mordred, and turns around to walk down the hall.  
*  
Arthur answers his door at arse o’clock in the morning to find Morgana on the other side. “Did a rescue go wrong?” he asks immediately, because she looks shaken and not much makes her look upset, at least not that he sees. “Are you okay? Do I need to radio Morgause?”

“We need to talk, Arthur. Let me ward your flat.”

He stands aside and waits, feeling foolish in nothing but boxers and a t-shirt, while she walks around the whole flat, muttering words that make the hair on his arms stand up. “Are you done?” he asks after she sketches a rune on the door in what appears to be lipstick. Even when she’s upset she lives to make his life more difficult.

“Sit down.”

“Should I make tea?”

“Arthur, sit down.”

Even when he sees her do magic, even though he knows, it’s hard to think of Morgana as a sorceress the same way even a glance at Morgause shows that she has power, the same way he could almost feel the magic rushing under Merlin’s skin. Sometimes, though, she’ll say something and he remembers that she’s powerful in her own right. He sits down. “It’s serious, then.”

“I’ve spent the whole of tonight in a meeting with Morgause and Alice and Merlin, not to mention several others. We’ve found out who’s in the hidden basement. Alvarr and some of the others made contact, talked to all four of them, found out what sort of security they know about down there. We’ve gone through every test and scenario we can, but it looks like we can only get one of them out without getting caught or setting off alarms.”

Arthur sighs, and tries not to think about what his father will do to the three who are left. “It’s awful, Morgana, but not entirely unexpected.”

“That’s not the part that’s going to upset you.” Morgana comes and sits next to him on the sofa, taking his hand like she hasn’t for years. “It’s who’s in there.”

His stomach drops. “Tell me.”

For one second, when she just looks at him with sympathy that sits oddly on her face, Arthur has the absurd and horrifying thought that his mother is locked up down there--not dead because the spark of life that created him killed her, but alive and mad, or magic, with a whole different story behind his father’s hatred for sorcery. “First, there’s a man … he just calls himself the Dragon. Always has. Merlin took the name in his honour, because everyone thought he was dead long ago, and he was one of the best-known wizards for a while, almost as powerful as Merlin. Some of the things your father did to him …”

The sympathy is for having a monster for a father, not because he would grieve for this “Dragon” in particular. “The others are similarly powerful, I assume?” he asks, voice rough but as steady as he can make it.

“Merlin’s father.” Arthur sits up straight, knocking her hand off his shoulder. “He’s … Uther didn’t hurt him, as much, because for a while he helped. He had children at home, and the Dragon wanted Merlin, so he helped Uther get him. And then Uther took him as well.”

“So he’s the one we’ll be saving, then. Merlin deserves that, he deserves a family.”

“It’s not just about Merlin, Arthur, and don’t start making judgments until I tell you who else is down there.” She looks at the lipstick print on the door, mouth twisting. “It’s Nimueh and Gaius.”

Arthur stares at her for a long moment, waiting for the sounds to resolve themselves into something else, something that makes more sense. It doesn’t happen. “Nimueh, my godmother?” The woman who spent the first five years of his life taking him out for posh teas and to the magical zoo on the sly. His father held his hand at her funeral, the last time he did so. “Morgana, she’s _dead_ , she died in a car crash when I was five, we know that. It can’t be her.”

“Uther kept offering and offering to let her be the first ones to try it when he found a proper cure, and she kept refusing, and he was worried about you because she was showing you magic. He tried to make her stop seeing you, and then he found out she was the one who encouraged your mother to get the fertility treatment, and he …”

“I don’t need to hear the rest of that story, thank you,” he snaps, because Morgana’s voice is too soft and sympathetic and he knew his father is misguided, knew that he does horrible things out of ignorance and grief, but never thought he would do this to his wife’s best friend. And to his own. “Gaius isn’t retired in a little cottage by the sea, then,” he adds when he trusts himself enough to talk. “He’s been locked up for the last four years? Why did Fath--why did Uther let him stay free for that long?”

“Gaius hid himself very well for a long time. Uther saw it by accident, and he was … you can imagine, I suppose. But Gaius says he doesn’t really do anything to him down there, and that he’s mostly ignored. If they manage a ‘cure’ that works and doesn’t just kill the sorcerers or drive them mad there are standing orders that he’s the first one to get it.”

Arthur breathes and waits while his world readjusts itself into a place where his father isn’t just ruthless and unreasonable, but the kind of man who would lock up his best friend and most loyal employee in a hidden basement. “Which one are we getting out, then?”

“Gaius.” He manages to look at her again, and remember just how shattered she looked when he opened the door. She only found all this out hours ago. “He knows what’s going on in the labs better than any of the others. He might be able to help some of the people who have already been released. Morgause and some of the others didn’t want to release him, since he was working against magic users for so many years, but Merlin talked them into it.”

“Merlin’s father is down there!”

“With Gaius out, we have more of a chance of getting the others out even after the security nightmare that will result. He knows Uther better than anyone.” She takes his hand. “Merlin knows to do what’s best. Are you okay, Arthur?”

“No. Let me know when I’ve got orders, would you? Unless you have them now.” Morgana shakes her head and drops his hand. “I’m not angry at you for bringing me the news, but I need to be alone to think about it.”

She kisses his forehead. “Don’t start feeling guilty for not knowing, Arthur. I never suspected either.”

“Thank you for letting me know. I imagine Morgause and the others weren’t particularly enthusiastic about telling me such important information.”

“Perhaps not, but we need you. Merlin and I both made that abundantly clear.”

Normally the subject of Merlin is one he avoids, especially around Morgana, but for once it’s safer than anything else on his mind. “The fact that Merlin trusts me that much after I threatened to kill him does not speak well of his intelligence.”

“You wouldn’t do it now. He knows that.”

It takes far too long to place the expression on Morgana’s face as the one he last saw when she tried to set him up with her friend Valiant at university. If it were a different world, this time he might be grateful. But he has to stay with his father and Merlin can’t come to the city and Arthur has no illusions about just how far anything could go. “Unless you’ve seen a big change coming, and soon, Morgana, you’ll drop this right now.”

“If I had to watch you shagging anyone in my visions, Arthur, I might actually support Uther finding a cure.” She pushes off the couch and stands. “Things are changing, but things are always changing. I can’t say anything for sure yet, and you know it. Just don’t shut off any opportunities.”

“It’s late, Morgana. Take down the wards before you go.”

She just smirks at him. “All you have to do is wash the mark off the door, and I don’t fancy cleaning in the middle of the night.” Arthur stands and lets her hug him before she goes to the door. “As soon as we know everything we’re dealing with to get Gaius out of the hidden basement you’ll get your orders. Just lay low until then.”  
*  
Merlin never feels more useless than he does the night he knows a big rescue is going on. He has his part at the very end, allowing those being transported through his wards and then taking care of them after, but none of it feels quite as real as his one rescue did. Tonight’s rescue, though, makes him want to transport himself to the city and leave Freya and Mordred to deal with the magic at the safehouse, or even Lancelot and Gwen, who are visiting her father again, since he’s been ill. Tonight there’s more danger than a standard rescue, with security layers they’ve spent a month working through. His father is down there, and Merlin hasn’t spoken to him in twenty years.

It’s Arthur’s first full-fledged rescue. It makes him a little sick that that’s the reason he keeps coming back to, when he should be worried that his father is actually alive and chances are that after they get Gaius out he’ll be moved somewhere even more inaccessible or even killed.

“Gwen is teaching Mordred and Freya how to use meditation to do yoga. She thinks if Mordred is concentrating on his body he’ll have better luck keeping his mind clear,” says Lancelot from the doorway.

“It might work. Gwen is good at that kind of thing, and nothing else has. We need … Gaius, I suppose. He’s a doctor, and he worked in the labs before he got trapped there.”

“Is that why you argued for his release? Mordred?” Merlin shrugs. Mordred’s the most immediate reason, the one he sees at the breakfast table every day, but he’s seen dozens of reasons that they need a doctor on their side. Not just Alice and her healing magic, but someone who knows what’s done there. Freya is still one of those reasons, for all she pretends she’s not. “You can join them if you want. I’ll watch the radio.”

“Then I’ll break an ankle and be Gaius’s first patient. A great welcome for him.” His knuckles are white where they’re gripping the radio. Gilli checked in twenty minutes ago to say they were starting. If everything goes well he probably won’t hear more until midnight at the soonest, when they get to the safe location to transport from. “Gwen and Freya do plan to put Mordred to bed eventually, don’t they?”

“He’ll just wake up when Gaius transports in.” Lancelot sits down across from him at the table but makes no move to take the radio. “Gwen and I have been talking about Mordred, a bit. It’s not fair to you and Freya to have him here. The safe house is supposed to be a long-term stop, but not forever.”

“We can’t just set him free to make his own life like we could the others once they made the right contacts. We’ve got to get him a family.”

“That’s what Gwen and I have been talking about.”

If it were anyone else, Merlin would ask if they were serious, or if they knew what they were actually getting into, taking in a mind-reader with minimal control over his powers. “It’s his choice in the end. You two will be great parents, but you don’t have magic, either, and he hasn’t had it easy.”

“We know a few mind-readers up north who might be able to help. And we won’t do it immediately. We want Gaius to have a look at him, at the very least.” Lancelot nods at the radio. “But don’t tell me that having him here doesn’t make it harder to do what you want to do.”

Merlin shakes his head. “I didn’t before Mordred came, either. Too much bother for me to transport to the city, break them out, and come back here. Besides, we’re all fugitives, but I’m the only one who ever got my name in the paper.”

“It’s not forever. The breakouts are changing public opinion, and Uther Pendragon won’t live forever. Arthur’s different.”

His gaze goes back to the radio. “I know that. The question is more how much damage he can do while he’s still around.”

“Come on. Strap the radio on in case there’s an emergency and come do yoga. Gwen won’t make you try to stand on one leg.”

Since there’s nothing else he can do at the moment, Merlin follows Lancelot down the hall to the living room and spends the next hour too tense to do any of the positions properly. It does seem to be helping Mordred, since he doesn’t give Merlin that too-knowing look he has very often, but Merlin excuses himself the first time Mordred yawns and Gwen decides it’s time to finish practicing for the night. They don’t enforce a bedtime (though Gwen and Lancelot seem to disapprove of that), but Mordred is still just a kid.

Merlin sits in near-silence, barely managing conversations with any of them who walk through the kitchen, until his radio starts in with the “urgent” tone half an hour before he was expecting anything. He flips the right switches and carries the radio outside, towards the shed where their transports are coordinated to come in. “This is the Dragon at the safe house. Who have I got?”

“Dragon, this is Wart.” Arthur is panting, and his voice is low, and Merlin doesn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified because the last he knew Gilli was doing the communication for the rescue team. “We’re having a bit of a hiccup.”

“Tell me.”

“We got the Doctor out, but we have about two minutes before an alarm goes off, and--” Arthur stops to do something. There’s no one talking in the background, just the sound of him panting while he talks. “If someone tries to transport in from station eight tonight, it is _not us_ , do you copy that? The staff there are safe, they got out, but the place itself is compromised. Morgause had to redo her transport and it wasn’t balanced, so all of us couldn’t do. I’m getting out on my own because security is less likely to shoot me on sight than the others.”

“You’re running,” Merlin realizes, wanting to be there immediately. Less likely to be shot or not, Arthur shouldn’t be alone out there. “That’s why you sound odd.”

“They told me to radio you and tell you that they aren’t coming through eight, and to shut down your wards to anything from there. I can tell you that Pendragon’s been looking for our safe house for quite some time now and he might even use magic to get there.”

Merlin goes into the wards, shutting down the right set of transport coordinates. It’s a clumsy job, but he and Freya can do better in the morning. She’s always liked doing wards. “So where are they coming from? Is he still coming tonight?”

“She says six. If anything changes they’ll pick up another radio and get in contact with you from there. They would have told you this themselves but they thought I should have this, since I’m on my own.”

“How close to being out are you?” He presses the radio closer to his ear, like he could fall through and be there to help if he just wishes hard enough.

“Close.” Like that’s some sort of cue, an alarm sounds, the same shrill whine Merlin hears in his nightmares sometimes. “Shit. I’m on the other side of the complex from the alarm, but they’re still going to be swarming pretty soon. I’ve got to get home, otherwise it’ll be three times now that I’ve been in the building when an alarm went off.”

“I’ll let you concentrate on running, then.” He wants to be there, even just watching from outside with his eyes and his magic so he could talk Arthur out, tell him what to avoid. Now all he can think is that if security shows up and don’t care who Arthur is, Merlin will hear him die and not be able to do anything. “Be safe.”

“I’ll try my best.”

“I--” Fuck, he forgets too often that he barely knows Arthur, that they’ve talked twice and neither time under the best circumstances. That he has no right to worry and want to protect him and feel his heart clench when Arthur manages to sound that fond and amused while running for his life. “Get word to me that you get out safe,” he says when all he gets as a reply to his choked-off sentence is the sound of the alarm and Arthur’s breathing. “Radio me in the morning, if you want.” The crystal Morgause rigged to show when someone’s coming lights up, and he swears. “I’ve got to go, but let me know somehow. You shouldn’t be alone out there.”

“Okay.”

Merlin flips the radio off the channel before he can say anything else stupid and watches as his next guest starts materializing in the middle of the shed with a twist of wind. He wishes it were his father. He wishes it were Arthur.  
*  
Arthur wakes after two fragmented hours of sleep to the sound of someone pounding on the door to his flat. He grabs his gun before he even stands, jumpy from his run across the facility and through the town, and walks through his flat as silently as possible to look through the peephole on the door and sees Morgana on the other side, wretched and pale, the way she only is after a bad dream. He opens the door.

“You have ten minutes to pack whatever’s most important to you,” she says, and shoves past him. “Stupid, stupid, _stupid_ , we didn’t know until I dreamed it just now.”

“What did I do wrong?” he asks, knowing it shouldn’t be the most important question, but if Morgana is here looking like that, saying that, it means that he got caught.

Her face crumples and she hugs him tight like she hasn’t since her father died. “Wasn’t your fault, Arthur, I promise, I should have seen before. We should have figured it out.”

“What happened?”

“Pack.” She shoves him gently, and he finally remembers to put the gun down. “Where’s your radio? I need to talk to Merlin.”

Merlin, who he promised to radio in the morning to say he was safe. “On the coffee table. Morgana, what _happened_?”

“Listen while I talk to him. Pack, Arthur, I was serious about the ten minutes. Your father has people on the way.”

Arthur goes into his bedroom and leaves the door open while he pulls on jeans and a clean t-shirt. Morgana mutters at the radio until there’s finally a tone and a voice on the other end. “This is the Dragon, what’s the matter?”

“This is Fay, and I’m sorry, but you’re getting more company tonight.”

“You’re on Wart’s radio. Is he okay?”

“For now. He’s packing. I’ve got a transport spell but you need to open your wards. We don’t have time to get him to a safe location.”

“If I open them--”

“If Uther knew where the safehouse was to monitor the wards he would have gone in there guns blazing already. Please, Dragon.”

“I’ll work on it. Tell me what happened.”

Arthur finds a backpack he hasn’t used since a hiking trip three summers ago and starts throwing things into it. Clean pants, shirts and trousers, as much money as he can find stuffed in drawers and pockets while he curses himself for using credit most of the time. “We missed a layer of security,” Morgana is saying from his living room. “Apparently whenever one of the cell doors down there is opened it automatically resets all the security systems. It doesn’t matter so much during the day, when the doors are open sometimes to give them food and … other things, so of course we didn’t notice and that basement isn’t even mentioned in the security files Wart has access to.” _Not your fault,_ she’s reminding him as clear as if she were looking right at him. “But we opened that cell door and it reset all the cameras we put on maintenance mode.”

That means he’s been caught running down some very damning hallways--through some of the wards, even. Arthur takes a second to fight down panic and looks around for more to pack. His mobile is useless, his ID won’t do him any good, his laptop would be helpful but too easy to trace. He leaves the picture of his father he has on his dresser and stuffs in the only one he has of his mother before going to the bathroom and putting in shampoo and a toothbrush, reassuringly normal things like he can convince himself he’s going on a camping trip.

“--just reset the wards so only he can get through,” Merlin is saying when he comes out of the bathroom and goes to stare at the bedroom again. There must be more in his life that he cares to bring.

“Don’t you need a piece of his essence to do that--oh.” Morgana looks up at him as he goes by and smirks, which makes everything just a bit more normal. “Have you got enough space there?”

“The house is as big as it needs to be.” There’s a pause. “I’ll be waiting. If I haven’t seen my crystal glow in ten minutes I’m going to assume you’re compromised and shut the wards down until I hear further. Clear?”

“Clear.” She flips the radio off and turns to look at Arthur. “Do you have everything? I can’t promise they won’t break anything you leave behind.”

“Clothes, toothbrush, my mother’s picture. Morgana, what is he going to do? He won’t have me arrested, because of the scandal, and he won’t kill me because I’m his son.”

She stands and takes his hand. “He didn’t kill Nimueh. He didn’t kill Gaius.”

Arthur thinks of the basement he was in tonight, and the nightmares he knows he’ll have when he can get a full night’s sleep again. He doesn’t have magic, but that doesn’t matter; of course his father would lock him up with the other traitors. The Dragon, who probably won’t last too much longer, skin like paper and mind half-gone while he rambles on about destiny and the other half of Arthur’s soul. Nimueh, who still looks surprisingly young and who grabbed his arm through the bars and told him how much he looks like his mother and then told him that he has to end it and kill his father before anything worse can happen. Balinor, who mostly just watched but asked them to give a message to his children. And Gaius, four years older but ten years frailer, who hugged Arthur and Morgana but barely said a word. “Get the others out,” he says.

“Right now I’m just worried about you.” She hugs him again. “I’m going to have to do as he does. If he throws you to the wolves, I talk about how you betrayed us and I hate you for it. If he says you died, I promise I will wear a fabulous hat for your funeral. Don’t believe anything about me that you don’t hear through the radio.”

“I won’t.” Arthur clutches at her shamelessly and drops his backpack to do it. “I love you. Be _careful_.”

“Don’t do anything rash,” she counters, and shoves him away. “You’ve got to go. I need time to get away. Pick up your bag and stand still. Completely still, I mean it.”

Arthur picks up his bag and closes his eyes while she chants words in that language that always slips from his mind no matter how much he tries to remember the words. He feels the magic wrap around him, even though Morgana always insists that he shouldn’t and he’s imagining things. It isn’t like Merlin’s rush of power that one night, not inside him and burning through his veins, but it makes every inch of his skin tingle while the world around him feels more and more disconnected. For a second, there’s a moment of terrifying emptiness, even the magic seeping away, and then it’s like something reaches out and grabs him, pulls him, and he finds himself staggering, knees weak, into someone’s arms.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” says Merlin, and Arthur thinks, a bit dazed, that this is them coming full circle. Merlin’s arm is at his waist and he’s pulling Arthur’s head onto his shoulder and even after two years he remembers how warm Merlin is, how he feels like he would snap like a twig until you realize just how much power there is in him. He keeps his eyes closed and breathes. After a while, Merlin speaks again. “The transport spell’s a bit disorienting the first time.”

That’s his cue to put himself back together, so Arthur gets his weight back properly on his feet and straightens slowly, a bit dizzy. They’re in some sort of dim shed, and it’s nearly dawn outside the window. Merlin looks tired, and not just from one night of being woken repeatedly for emergencies. “Thank you,” he manages, and clutches the strap of his pack a little tighter.

He expects Merlin to lead him to the safehouse immediately and to leave him to himself for a while. It’s what he would do, especially on so little sleep and considering how little they know each other. Instead, Merlin squints at him and his hands twitch like he’s going to reach out again. “Are you okay?”

Arthur doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. Merlin isn’t talking about the transport any longer. Still, that doesn’t mean he wants to talk about it. “I’m better off than most people who come here are,” he says, and looks away.

“Come inside. We’ll get you sorted.”

Merlin leads the way, and Arthur follows.  
*  
Merlin staggers into the kitchen around noon to find Arthur sitting at the table, clutching a mug of coffee that has long since gone cold, if the sludge in the pot is anything to go by. He doesn’t look any better than he did when he first appeared in the shed, wide-eyed and exhausted like every other person they’ve ever rescued. “How long have you been up?” he asks, putting the coffee machine to rights to start another pot.

“I think I slept an hour or two.”

Merlin winces. He may not know Arthur’s expressions, for all he’s imagined them in their few short conversations, but he knows his voice, and how unnatural it is for him to sound that flat and quiet. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Gaius is still sleeping. Or at least I haven’t seen him this morning.” He still hasn’t looked at Merlin. “Freya and Mordred went out to the lake after breakfast to practice meditation in the fresh air.” Merlin wishes he’d thought to warn Mordred of Arthur’s arrival before he came out of his room this morning; he’s heard the thoughts of other refugees, but Arthur’s thoughts must be like a shout this morning. No wonder they’ve gone outside. “I’m sorry. I’ve made things more difficult.”

“Arthur, no.” Merlin doesn’t know he has an impulse to check until he’s already kneeling beside Arthur’s chair, holding his arm and twisting to meet his eyes. He hadn’t imagined this, this instant connection that he thought was just adrenaline and attraction mixed into something strange. His magic is reaching right along with his hands, but at least he has the control to hold that back. “Everyone knows that you’re on our side, and you went through hell last night.”

“Not like your sister, or Gaius, or Mordred.”

“No.” He manages to pry his hands off Arthur and goes back to the coffee pot to hide his blush. “Not like them. But you had to run for your life from your own father last night, Arthur. Nobody is going to discriminate because you don’t have magic. That would make us just as bad as--”

Neither of them finishes the sentence. Neither of them has to. “Thank you. I’ll find a place to move on as soon as I can.”

Merlin shakes his head, but doesn’t look to see if Arthur is watching him do it. “People know what you look like. Most everyone else can hide as long as their escape doesn’t get as publicized as Freya’s was, but people know you. Give it time. We’re in no hurry to be rid of you.”

“Your father asked us to tell you and your sister that he loves you, and he’s sorry,” Arthur says suddenly, and looks up at him when he starts, still terrifyingly blank. He shouldn’t look like this, and Merlin doesn’t know how to make it better. He can’t even hurt at the message that should be reducing him to tears, because it’s too easy to remember that the message was brought by someone whose father sent police after him last night. “I meant to tell you last night. I should have.” He looks back at his cold coffee. “They’ll probably tell you again over the radio, but I thought it was the sort of thing that should come in person.”

Gaius picks that moment to shuffle through the door, still more tired and frail than Merlin has seen anyone, and he freezes when he sees Arthur. “My boy, what are you doing here?” he asks, voice choked, and Arthur bows his head so quickly it looks like he’s falling, shoulders shaking.

Merlin wants to reach out for him again, but Arthur must want a familiar face and Gaius certainly must as well. He gives Gaius a nod, gives Arthur’s arm one last fleeting touch, and leaves the room before his coffee is even finished. They can have their privacy.

The next few days are some of the most uncomfortable that he’s spent in the safehouse. Gaius, after a day of looking shaky and jumping at every noise, proves to be friendly and kind, and everyone takes to him immediately. He spends hours on the radio to Morgause and Alice detailing procedures and chemical reactions that make Merlin sick just to overhear, examines Mordred thoroughly and takes over his training, chats amiably with Gwen and Lancelot, and joins Freya at her evening meditation. Merlin finds himself liking the older man immensely where he’d thought he would resent him for not being his father.

Arthur is something different entirely. It isn’t that the others don’t like him, though Freya and Mordred certainly don’t trust him. It’s that he seems to think himself unwelcome, no matter what Merlin and Gaius say to the contrary, and acts accordingly. When he’s not in his room or eating or (very rarely) chatting with Gaius, he’s out on the grounds. He doesn’t go beyond the wards, mostly just sits out in the woods, but it worries Merlin.

It doesn’t help that Arthur seems to have put him permanently on edge. Even without the wards, he has an ability to sense Arthur’s presence that would embarrass him if Arthur didn’t seem just as attuned to him. They have a disconcerting habit of looking up at the same time when they’re at a distance or in a group, and Merlin thinks he could probably close his eyes when Arthur is in a room and know every time he moves. It isn’t even magic, because his magic’s never done it, and he suspects that Arthur feels it too.

On the third day, Gwen corners Merlin while Gaius is with Freya and Lancelot and Mordred are playing catch in the backyard. “You need to talk to Arthur.”

“He won’t talk, and I don’t know what to say.”

She looks out the kitchen window and he follows her gaze to see Arthur walk off into the woods. Again. “Lancelot and I haven’t wanted to mention, but it’s in the papers and he deserves to know. Pendragon’s said that he was killed in one of the raids, defending his father’s company.”

Merlin winces, and thinks Arthur would probably rather be remembered as a traitor than as the excuse for all of Albion to go on a witch-hunt for those responsible. “I’ll talk to him. Could you bring some papers tomorrow when you come? We don’t get television here.”

“Go on, then,” says Gwen, and shoos him out of the house.

Arthur’s waiting for him, of course, just outside of Mordred’s range, which he has an uncanny ability to sense and avoid. That probably endears him to Mordred more than anything else could. “You want to talk to me,” says Arthur.

Merlin has a hundred stupid things he wants to say, about how he wants Arthur to believe they want him here, and how none of it is his fault, and how scared he is of whatever this thing is that they don’t acknowledge, but only because neither of them seems able to do anything about it. It’s best, though, to start with the practical. “We’ve had some news about what your father is saying happened to you.”

“Tell me.”

Gwen or Gaius would probably be better at telling him, but he won’t talk to either of them, not properly. He won’t talk to Merlin either, but he hasn’t walked away yet, at least. “He’s saying you died that night,” Merlin says as gently as he can manage. Arthur just gives him a tight nod. “But he says that you died defending Pendragon Corp from the raid.”

Arthur takes a shaky breath. “I thought at least that he would let me have--I don’t know, a car crash, or something. Something not related at all, if he refused to cause a scandal and say I wasn’t on his side. He gave Nimueh that much, at least.”

Merlin lifts his hand and lets it drop again when Arthur actually flinches back. “He’s trying to make you angry. Flush you out.”

“Yes, well, it’s working. He’s--” Arthur lets out a strangled noise, whirls, and punches a tree.

He only does it once, but Merlin grabs his hand before he can do it again anyway, inspecting the scrape and knowing what shape the bruise will be before it starts to appear. He’s not always a good healer, but he wills his magic into Arthur’s hand anyway, closing skin and soothing the rattled bones. This much he can do.

After a second, Arthur gasps, and Merlin keeps his eyes on the healing skin of Arthur’s hand so he can pretend he doesn’t know that Arthur’s crying.  
*  
When it airs, Gwen and Lancelot download the footage of Arthur’s memorial service onto their laptop and bring it to the safehouse.

Everyone starts backing away the second Arthur has it in his hands, like they’re afraid he’ll explode. Everyone except Merlin, who just watches with his head cocked to the side, biting his lip and waiting to see what Arthur will do. “Let’s make popcorn and all watch it together,” he says, just to see Merlin smile, and is rewarded when his face lights up.

Freya excuses herself, but Gwen makes popcorn while the rest of them settle in the living room with the laptop where they can all see it. Arthur doesn’t know if Merlin sits next to him for comfort or just because it’s a good view, but he’s grateful either way.

The crowd at his funeral is massive and eerily silent. His father stands next to a closed (and hopefully empty) casket, straight-backed and dry-eyed, with Morgana next to him. Morgana, as she promised, is wearing the kind of hat they always used to make fun of in old films, and she’s crying as the camera pans over her.

It’s outside, at the park he always played in as a child, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people are standing there, enough so it’s hard to see a scrap of grass on the recorded broadcast. Nobody is screaming, though many are crying. Many have signs, too, both anti-magic and pro-magic. Uni mates, co-workers, acquaintances, strangers, and, most surprisingly, what seems like most of the underground. They’re there to send a message, to be certain, but Arthur doesn’t know for whom.

There’s no priest. Arthur wouldn’t have wanted one if he had died, but it means that his father runs the proceedings, and the second he opens his mouth on the recording Arthur wants to run. His father knows how to sway a crowd; nothing he does would be excused, were it otherwise. He knows how to make his evil and his cruelty sound reasonable and right, and Arthur knows that this situation will give him all the ammunition he needs to take the sorcerers down.

Whatever he set out to do, though, he fails. Perhaps it’s that the crowd is reeling with grief and surprise. Perhaps they don’t believe him. Whatever it is, though, almost no one starts cheering while he speaks against sorcerers, the danger of them, how they’ve taken away everything he’s ever loved, how magic must be removed from the world. Things he’s said a hundred times to cheering crowds leeave nothing but silence. When he finally finishes, he looks disconcerted.

Morgana, in the hat that Arthur can’t stop laughing at, steps up next, clutching a handkerchief delicately in her hands. “Arthur would hate this, all this fuss and bother. He believed in doing things, not talking about them. So I’m not going to talk long. I’m going to tell you that this won’t last long. This is enough.” For a second, Arthur wonders if she’s going to tell them the truth right there, although if Morgause and the rest of the underground are doing their job a rumour got passed through that crowd. Instead, Morgana dabs at her eyes, giving the camera her best side, before straightening her shoulders and looking out. “We’re going to find a cure, so we can stop this.” She holds out her hands, milking the drama for all it’s worth. Arthur snorts and throws popcorn at the screen, which gets him a scandalized look from Gwen and Lancelot. “This fighting has gone on long enough. Please, if whoever is kidnapping the volunteers is out there today, stop before someone else gets hurt.”

The crowd, as he watches, erupts into angry murmurs, even a few shouts. If there’s a rumour spreading, it hasn’t spread fast enough.

There’s more to Morgana’s speech, if he knows her, maybe enough to goad a riot (perhaps that’s what the underground was there for), but Uther steps forward and steers her away from the microphone.

From there, it’s a joke, full of speeches from people who have no idea who he is. Leon gives an elegy he would be proud to have, even if it’s about the wrong person. Given a chance, he thinks he could have brought Leon to their side. That’s Morgana’s job, now, if she chooses it.

The broadcast was an hour, and by the end everyone but Merlin and Arthur has found an excuse to be elsewhere. Arthur has spent the last half hour playing a game with himself to see if he can identify those in the crowd who have figured out that it’s all a lie. It’s more than he would have thought, and not just sorcerers. “We’re going to beat him soon,” Arthur says when the broadcast finally ends. “Three years ago that crowd would have been out for blood. A sorcerer wouldn’t have even made it into the park.”

“It will be good to go back,” says Merlin, looking down and picking at a loose thread on his jeans. “I sometimes think Freya might stay here. She likes it here, and that’s fine. But I need to go back. I need to help, if it’s ever safe.”

“You’ll be more use than me,” says Arthur, because it’s the truth. “Nobody will trust me.”

“We’ll need everyone.” Merlin must know it sounds like a platitude, because a second later he elbows Arthur. “You can be my assistant. Fold my letters for me and stick them in envelopes and all that.”

Arthur looks to the side to find Merlin looking serious, probably waiting to see if his joke went over well. He knows that they’ve all been walking on eggshells around him since he arrived, but this is different. “Speaking as someone who’s had an assistant,” he says in as disdainful a tone as he can muster, “I can tell you that the job is more sending e-mails than letters, these days. You really must move with the times.”

Every smile he gets from Merlin feels like a reward, because for all they’d talked a few times before he came to the safehouse, he’d never heard Merlin happy or relaxed before. This one is brief, but at least it’s there for a second before Merlin goes serious again and turns more fully to meet his eyes. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes. Not quite yet, but I will be.” He shrugs and sits up to shut the laptop. “It’s not like I didn’t know long ago that my f--that Uther isn’t a very nice man.” Arthur forces a smile and knows it doesn’t fool Merlin because neither of them can seem to fool the other. “I suppose I can’t call him my father any longer. Arthur Pendragon is dead.”

“You’ve got a better family here,” Merlin says, unexpectedly fierce, and Arthur almost shivers at the tone. Merlin doesn’t need golden eyes to sound like he has power. “If you don’t want his name, you don’t have to keep it.”

Arthur makes his tone as obnoxious as he can because he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. “What, Merlin, going to invite me to be your brother?”

Those seem to be the magic words to transform Merlin from someone who could bend the universe to his will with a blink to a skinny man a few years younger than Arthur who looks more tired than anyone has a right to. “No,” he whispers. “But we’re family.”

Someone clears their throat at the door to the living room and both of them whip around at once, spilling what’s left of the popcorn all over the floor. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” says Gaius in the same dry way Arthur remembers from years worth of scoldings and scrapes, eyebrows raised. “I thought you two ought to know, though. We’ve had word from the city, about … the other three, who I was placed with. Morgause wants to speak with you, Merlin.”

Merlin lunges out the doorway, skidding on stocking feet, before Arthur can begin to react. Arthur just looks at Gaius. “It isn’t good news, is it.”

“You know that already,” says Gaius, and turns to follow Merlin.  
*  
The news isn’t as bad as it could be. Merlin repeats that to himself over and over while he tells everyone else at the safehouse what Morgause told him, even though it makes Mordred give him pitying looks with every repetition. “Chances are we’ll still be able to find Balinor and Nimueh wherever they’ve been moved,” he says when a look around proves that everyone is looking shaken even though they were expecting half the news. “He hasn’t killed them. That’s only to the good. And with Fay there we do have a better chance than we otherwise might to get to them.”

“The Dragon was old,” says Gaius, who shouldn’t be comforting anyone. He’s doing well, though, and taking the news better than the rest of them. “He wouldn’t have lasted long anyway. These past few years, he’s barely been holding on.”

Merlin nods at him, even though it doesn’t really help. “There’s going to be a vigil, in the city. For everyone who knows the Dragon didn’t just disappear when the persecution got to be too much. Morgause says they’re going to start spreading rumours. About him.” He sneaks a glance at Arthur, who just looks back. “About you. The whole city is going to be wondering by tomorrow, and the newspapers will have picked it up by the day after. Unless Pendragon still has enough friends in the government to tamp it down quickly, they’re going to take quite a hit. Even if it can’t be proven.”

Ever since Arthur transported in, Merlin can’t stop the sense that they’re close to something. Pendragon can’t last long without his heir apparent, and with a man who has more damning evidence against him than any other free and out of sight. He’s always reminding himself not to get his hopes up, that chances are he’ll be living in this house until he’s fifty and too tired and worn to go back to the city. This, however, feels different. For all Arthur is miserable and shaken, his presence here means that some sort of tide has changed, and looking around at his friends he can almost see them figuring it out as well.

“There’s another rescue scheduled for next week. Nothing high-security, we can’t even risk the children’s ward again quite yet, but someone, at least,” he adds when the news seems to have sunk in enough. It isn’t the same as saving the Dragon, but it’s a reminder that there are still plenty of others. “We’ll have to get ready for more company. Till then, business as usual. I just wanted to make sure we all knew about the Dragon.”

He didn’t know the Dragon, not really. But every child with magic in Albion heard about him for a long time, the strongest Seer anyone had seen in centuries and a little bit mad with it. His mother told him when he was thirteen that his father met him a few times (and then, it seems, spent years upon years locked up with him) and that he’d talked about Merlin, called him by name. Of all those left in high security he’s perhaps the one that least matters to those in the safehouse, but he certainly matters to Albion. If the word gets out …

Gaius interrupts the silence between them all before it drags on too much. “Mordred, it’s time to practice putting up your shields again. Let’s go outside so you’ve just got me to concentrate on.”

“My father’s expecting us for dinner,” says Gwen, taking Lancelot’s hand, and that’s everyone’s cue to make excuses and separate to think about whatever it is that they need to think about in the wake of all this.

Merlin isn’t sure what he needs, but he walks out into the woods after Gwen and Lancelot go, leaving Freya reading a book in the living room and Arthur still sitting in the kitchen. He finds a spot just inside the wards and does stupid little magic tricks like he hasn’t in years until he feels a little bit calmer.

Arthur finds him, of course, after about an hour. He shouldn’t expect anything different. “I feel like an idiot asking,” says Arthur when he gets close enough, “but are you okay?”

“If we had to lose one of them, I’m almost glad it was him,” he admits. “But that’s just because of you and me. For the movement? It would have been nice to have the Dragon.”

“We’ve got you, though.” Merlin snorts. Arthur sits down on the ground a few feet away from him. “No, really. I am who I am and so people wouldn’t tell me much that they thought might get back to my--to Uther, but that doesn’t mean I don’t listen. People whisper about you like the kids used to whisper about the Dragon for the first few years after he disappeared.”

“I never asked to be a legend.”

“Merlin.” Merlin tries not to grin at the way Arthur drawls his name. “You found out your sister got cursed and went to a clinic where someone sent her off to Pendragon Corp. Instead of giving up and counting her as lost as hundreds of other families have, you found a ragtag group of the maddest people in Albion, broke her out, and started a revolution. I would argue that you did actually ask to be a legend.”

“I didn’t start it,” he tries, even though he sort of did. Morgause was the one with the dreams of being the first to break someone out of the facility, Gilli was the one who hated Pendragon Corp so much he would do anything to bring it down, Alice was the one with the knowledge and connections, Fay (he knows her real name and has for years, but still can’t remember to call her by it) was the one with the security codes, but Merlin was the one with someone he wanted to get out enough to bring them all together.

Arthur arches a disbelieving eyebrow, and Merlin thinks that this is how he’s meant to be. Not closed-off and halfway to shattered and reeling, but someone who’s a bit of an arse, but funny and noble and wanting to fix everything that’s wrong with the world. “People are going to rally behind you,” he insists.

Merlin tosses a bit of leaf matter at him. “Not just me. People on Uther’s side will think I’m just another sorcerer tricking them. When his own son comes out of hiding and tells them all what he’s done? That will get them.”

“Together, then,” says Arthur, and Merlin stretches his hand out because it feels right in a moment that suddenly seems to mean a lot more than it did a second ago. Arthur takes it, but he doesn’t shake it and let go. He holds on.

“Tell me this isn’t just me,” Merlin blurts. The hum of magic, the whole world around him seems to have gone quiet, everything but Arthur’s pulse pressed against his fingers, the backbeat to his own. He’s back in a nondescript hallway at two in the morning with a stranger holding him, but this time they’re on the same side.

Arthur squeezes a little tighter. “Two fucking years,” he says, and pulls Merlin forward across the space between them until he sprawls into Arthur’s body, catches his face in his free hand, and kisses him.

Like everywhere else, they seem to have the disconcerting ability to know exactly where the other one will be in just a second. Arthur tilts his face and Merlin is already in the right place, and when Merlin dares to think to tease Arthur’s mouth open Arthur’s lips are already parting, releasing a gasp of air into the kiss. He wants everything, wants to wrap Arthur in himself and his magic and never have anything but this, Arthur’s mouth and the taste of the ridiculously posh toothpaste he brought with him and the clutch of a warm strong hand around his.

“Inside, we’ve got to take this inside,” he manages, and Arthur pulls away to gasp into his shoulder. “Anyone could walk by like this.”

They stand in a fumble of limbs, and don’t let go of one another the whole walk back.  
*  
Nobody interrupts them on their way into the house and upstairs, though Arthur knows Mordred at least must know where they’re going and that Gaius and Freya probably didn’t miss their clasped hands. He doesn’t think that Merlin sees any of it. He just stares at the ground in front of them while he walks with an expression of intense concentration that would be funny if it weren’t a little bit worrying as well.

When they get to the top of the stairs, Arthur stops and keeps Merlin’s hand so he’ll stop too. “You’re upset. We don’t have to, you know.”

Merlin drops his hand, and for a second Arthur prepares to apologize for misinterpreting the situation, but then Merlin grabs his face in both hands and presses their foreheads together. “I want to, of course I want to, Arthur. It’s all just …”

Arthur would nod if he had any interest whatsoever in moving. He knows what it is. “Overwhelming,” he offers. “If you’re sure, then.”

“You make me feel like I’m about to be ravished of my maidenly virtue.” Merlin backs away a step and catches Arthur’s hand again, pulling him past the doorway to his own mostly-empty room and to Merlin’s, which is filled with late-afternoon sunlight and less messy than Arthur would have expected. “Well, this is it.”

“Shut up,” says Arthur, and shuts the door.

It’s unbearably silent for a moment. They both know where this is going, though they haven’t quite hit the point of no return yet, but it’s hard to know where to start. Merlin smiles and speaks. “I need to ward the room. If it were night and Mordred was in his room, that’s one thing, but people tend to sort of … broadcast, and he’s having enough trouble as it is.”

Arthur is torn between amusement and horror, but he nods and watches Merlin’s eyes go molten. He doesn’t bother wandering around the room sketching runes and making marks in bright red lipstick that will stain wood grain (which he’s still bitter about even if he knows logically he’ll never go back to that flat). He just stares around and the tingle of magic that Arthur always feels present at the safehouse intensifies until his skin prickles with it. “God, that feels odd.”

Merlin gives him a sharp look and lets the magic go. “So you do feel it when we do magic. I’d wondered. Not many people without magic of their own are sensitive.”

“I didn’t. Or at least less, until you--” Until Merlin had showed him for half an instant what it would be like to really have magic, but to bring that up means bringing up the gun he threatened Merlin with that night, and he doesn’t want that.

Of course Merlin knows, though, and he knows not to say anything comforting. Instead, he wraps his arms around Arthur’s shoulders and pulls him in for another kiss, this one deeper than their shaky exploration in the woods. Arthur puts his hands at Merlin’s hips and pushes back, teases at Merlin’s mouth with little licks until he huffs out a laugh and opens, tangling his tongue with Arthur’s, slick and sweet. He feels a bit dazed, a bit desperate, wants everything from Merlin but doesn’t know what to do first. He pushes his hands up under Merlin’s loose t-shirt, just to feel the smooth expanse of skin.

Merlin pulls away first. “Clothes, we’ve got to get our clothes off.”

“Right,” says Arthur, and starts pulling at Merlin’s shirt, tugging through Merlin’s laughter until he can get it off entirely, throw it somewhere out of sight and run his hands over the exposed skin. Merlin is thin, all ribs and elbows and skin so pale he can almost see the veins, but there’s strength, too, and the lines of a tattoo on his shoulder that Arthur will have to investigate later. For now, though, he puts his mouth to the notch of Merlin’s collarbone, tasting the salt of his sweat and feeling his breath flutter while he shoves at his trousers.

“Fuck, Arthur, I meant you too,” says Merlin, and Arthur feels the vibration of it against his lips before he pulls away and kicks off his shoes and socks as quickly as he can, grabs his shirt at the hem and almost rips it pulling it over his head. He wants to unwrap Merlin like a present, but he wants skin, too, and hopefully there will be time for that later, so he strips to his boxers and looks around to find Merlin transfixed, halfway out of one shoe. “You’re so--”

“You obviously can’t be trusted to undress yourself,” says Arthur, feeling a bit mad, and manhandles Merlin to the bed, dumping him on it and moving to tug at his shoes, his socks, so he can take his trousers and pants off in one tangled mess and then bend to press a kiss, a marker, to the jut of a hipbone, to the spot just below his navel.

Merlin curls a hand around his neck and pulls so gently Arthur barely feels it, but he nods, pulls away barely long enough to shed his boxers, and gets onto the bed, aligning his body with Merlin’s, pressed half on top of him, faces just an inch or two apart. Merlin’s eyes are wide and dark and very blue, not a hint of magic in them. “Here,” he says, and kisses Arthur again, lets Arthur press him into the pillows with the sun spilling across them, lets him run his hands feverish and fast across Merlin’s skin.

Arthur worries for a few seconds that he’s too rough, too fast, too desperate, because Merlin feels thin and so tentative underneath him, but if Merlin wanted to stop him, it would be as easy as blinking. He wrenches his mouth away, and quirks a smile when Merlin actually makes a protesting noise. That quite neatly answers that question. “Don’t hold back,” he says.

For a second, Merlin looks confused, but then he smiles, because of course he understands. “I won’t if you don’t.”

He meant to make this first time soft and sweet when he thought about it (and he has been thinking about it, even when Merlin’s only memory of him was the cold metal of a gun and a heated exchange of words and it was stupid to think about it), but it’s hard to remember that now when everything in him is crying out for _more, faster, now_.

There will be time to touch and lick every inch of Merlin’s skin later, time to find out where he’s ticklish and what will make him arch from the sheets, time to feel his hands everywhere. Now, he’s more desperate for the connection than he is to be gentle, and this time when he kisses Merlin, he takes a bruising hold of his hip and pulls them together, Merlin’s hard cock dragging against his.

Merlin bites down on his lip and when he presses his palm to Arthur’s back his skin tingles, the feeling following wherever his hand moves, like he’s marking Arthur with his magic. It isn’t the same as being filled with it, but it brings back the edges of the feeling, an echo. Like he could rule the world and lose himself to it at the same time. Arthur gasps into the kiss and rolls them, getting his hands under him until he can hover over Merlin and push their hips together.

Their skin is getting slippery when Merlin pulls away from his mouth to scatter kisses on his jaw and face and neck, arching up off the bed and leaving little jolts of magic wherever he touches. “I want you to fuck me,” he whispers in Arthur’s ear, and Arthur thrusts without meaning to, smiling when Merlin smiles at him because he can’t help it.

“Yes, please,” he whispers back, just to feel Merlin shiver and to watch his eyes go gold while a drawer beside the bed creaks open and a little bottle of lube deposits itself in Arthur’s hand.  
*  
“Eager,” says Arthur, waving the lube in Merlin’s face, and Merlin can’t keep the slightly mad grin from stealing across his face. It’s been a while since he was with anyone, and even then it was just uni one-night-stands where he had to be careful with himself and his magic. This doesn’t feel like that. _Arthur_ doesn’t feel like that. Arthur’s face goes slack with desire every time Merlin lets his magic loose even a bit, and it’s a temptation just to give in to his urges and drench Arthur in his power--not to do anything, but just to feel it in them both.

“Come on.”

Arthur slicks his fingers, eyes on Merlin’s the whole time, and it’s more of a rush than Merlin could have imagined, seeing him there above him. He remembers Arthur’s strength, the grip of his hand against Merlin’s throat, the steadiness of his body, but feeling it like this, all of it channeled into hips and hands and kisses, it’s dizzying, its own sort of magic. “May I?”

Merlin arches, feels around for a pillow and settles it under his hips. “Go slow. It’s been a while,” he warns, and watches Arthur’s face soften as he shuffles down the bed, making a path down Merlin’s body with slippery fingers and kiss-swollen mouth.

Telling him to go slow, Merlin discovers within moments, was a mistake, because Arthur is both breathtakingly tender and a hideous tease as he coaxes Merlin oh-so-slowly open. He kisses and licks his way up Merlin’s cock, mouths at his balls, swirls a finger at his entrance until he’s hitching his hips in tiny helpless movements, and only presses it inside when Merlin puts a hand in Arthur’s hair. He’s bursting with too much magic, and it might sting, but Arthur just hums around the head of his cock and presses inside, slowly, so slowly.

It’s like a dream, the late-afternoon light moving slowly across the bed, catching in Arthur’s hair and warming their skin to feverish heat, Arthur inside him with one finger, with two, with three, stroking his stomach with his other hand while Merlin tosses his head to the side, mouths _I love you_ to the air and hopes that Arthur wasn’t looking, because it’s too soon but it was hard enough to stop the sound of the words; he couldn’t hold back the shape of them. “I’m ready,” he moans when he can manage it.

Arthur slides his fingers out carefully, slicks his cock as he moves back up the bed, kissing just the same erratic trail up as he did back down and making Merlin grin because of course he would remember something as small and silly as that. He moves Merlin’s legs to clasp around his hips, hands slippery where he touches, and nudges his cock at Merlin’s entrance. Merlin rocks into it, encouraging him.

“Okay, okay,” says Arthur, and pushes in. It’s just on the right side of too-much, and Merlin gasps with every inch of it, wanting to move and wanting to freeze in equal measure. They pause when Arthur’s seated as deep as he can go, and Merlin wants to squirm. Instead, he catches Arthur’s eye, and they just watch each other for an endless second. “Don’t hold back,” Arthur murmurs again at the end of it.

“Move,” says Merlin, and Arthur draws out and thrusts in, and again, and again, harder as Merlin gets used to the stretch and the ache and the wonder of it. He lets his power free, because nothing that’s part of him could possibly want to hurt Arthur, and instead of spreading through the room as it has when he’s let it out before, it curls around Arthur, wrapping him in gold and soaking in. Arthur lets out a fraught noise and reaches out blindly for Merlin’s hand, moving faster and harder and the magic is humming happily around them both, not doing anything but reflecting their own pleasure back on them. Merlin holds Arthur’s hand and his gaze and moves to meet every thrust, hard and dizzy with it.

“Close, I’m close,” Arthur chokes out after a while, or maybe Merlin only feels the increasing desperation.

“Come on, then.” Merlin passes an extra bolt of power through their joined hands, watches Arthur’s eyes bleed into gold for a flicker of an instant before he squeezes them shut, shouting out his release as Merlin arches until he’s resting his weight on his shoulders, the echo of Arthur’s pleasure through his magic making him scramble to fist his own cock and come in two pulls, splashing hot between them as Arthur locks his knees to keep from collapsing and starts to pant.

It takes Merlin too long to remember how to drop his legs from Arthur’s hips, to put himself at the right angle so Arthur can draw out, careful and slow and leaving him feeling odd and empty, but too big for his own skin at the same time, while his magic draws back within his body. He pulls weakly on their joined hands, toppling Arthur on top of him and losing what little breath he’s managed to keep.

“Are you okay?” Arthur manages to ask, muffled in Merlin’s shoulder.

Merlin gives his hair a caress, unthinking. “Yes. We’ll sleep now. Talk about it later.”

Arthur’s breaths only take a minute or so to go deep and slow, almost at the edge of snoring, and Merlin squirms until some of the weight is off his chest, magic almost purring in contentment as he curls against Arthur and goes to sleep still holding his hand.

It’s dark when they wake up and they’ve probably missed dinner, but no one will bother them after the afternoon they all had and Merlin doesn’t much care anyway. They make love again in the dark of the room, just their hips and hands pushing together, moonlight weak but there enough for Merlin to see Arthur’s eyes always on him, the tendons of his neck standing out when he comes.

After, Arthur rolls him to his side and traces the lines of his tattoo with fingers and tongue, getting to know every line in the light that Merlin manages to conjure for the purpose. “It’s just a branch,” says Arthur at last, sounding puzzled. “It doesn’t look finished.”

Merlin looks over his shoulder and smiles. “A friend of mine was a tattoo artist. Might still be. But anyway, he was too broke to do it for free, and I wanted a whole tree, spread over my back.” Arthur traces a finger down his spine. “Yes, like that. But I didn’t have the money for the whole thing, so he did the branch for what I could spare, and I started saving up for the whole tree. Was about halfway there when Freya …”

Arthur turns him back over, kisses him slow and soft. “You should look him up when we get back.”

Merlin rolls his eyes and doesn’t say that he thinks they’ll have bigger things to worry about, when Pendragon Corp is taken down. Instead, he catches Arthur’s hand in his and traces the lines of Arthur’s palm with one finger. “You’ve heard one of my stories. Now I want one of yours.”

After looking too serious for a second, Arthur tells him a story about Morgana telling him about the Frog Prince when he was a child and Arthur kissing a frog, which Morgana then gleefully informed him would give him warts, thereby earning the nickname that they use on the radio channel. Merlin laughs, and tells him about uni scrapes and his mother and chasing away Freya’s first boyfriend when he made her cry. Arthur tells him about running away when he was eight and sleeping on Gaius’s couch the first time he got pissed because his father locked him out and Morgana’s habit of getting him in trouble at every turn.

It’s nearly midnight by the time both of them are hungry enough to get out of bed, Merlin muttering cleaning spells over them and the sheets while they get dressed, and they sneak downstairs quietly enough to fool absolutely nobody, laughing and arguing about stupid little things while they make cheese on toast and eat it standing over the stove. Merlin knows that in the morning there will still be the Dragon’s death to worry about, and the next rescue, and everyone staying with them already, but for now he’s content to tease Arthur about kissing frogs and hold his hand, ready to drag him upstairs and back to bed when they’re ready.  
*  
Arthur wakes alone the morning after the next scheduled rescue, and after a week with Merlin it already feels odd to be in bed without him. Still, it’s not entirely unexpected. Merlin has someone new to welcome, after all. He gets dressed and makes his way down the stairs.

Merlin, Gaius, and Freya are sitting around the kitchen table, all looking a bit shell-shocked and staring around, which can’t mean anything good. “Is the latest story bad?” Arthur asks when they look up. “Is she sleeping?”

“Come sit down,” says Merlin, and Arthur pours himself a cup of coffee before he obeys. “Things went wrong last night.”

“How wrong?”

“Sophia, the girl we were meant to rescue … her father’s got some friends in the government, for all he’s a sorcerer, and he said he would help us if we got his daughter out, even though she was caught by the police and not sent in through a clinic.” Arthur nods. He’s heard her name, though not the full story. “She apparently worked out some sort of bargain with Pendragon. He would free her if she set off the alarm when she got rescued. So she did.”

It’s too easy to imagine what went wrong. “Who were the casualties?”

“She died in the scuffle,” says Gaius. “Most of the others got away, though their names and appearances are out there now, and they’ve had to go to ground. But Gilli was captured. We haven’t heard what’s happening to him, but it can’t be pleasant.”

Arthur hates to ask, when they’re all already upset and grieving, but he has to know. “Does he know about Morgana?”

Merlin shakes his head. “She was busy last night, luckily, or we would be in a lot more trouble this morning. Morgause and the others are refusing to come here, so we’re on high alert in case they need a quick getaway. They’ve shut down every safe place they’ve got in the city and are finding new ones, but we don’t know how much he’s getting out of Gilli.”

“So what can we do?” Arthur says, moving his chair to the side so he can put his arm around Merlin’s shoulders. Freya looks up from her cup of tea long enough to give him a brief smile.

“Nothing, really,” says Merlin, turning his head to the side just long enough to brush a kiss against Arthur’s jaw. “Other than be ready if they need us and be prepared if Pendragon tortures our location out of Gilli.”

All of them still seem broken up, and much as Arthur wants to join them, he grits his teeth and focuses on the practicalities. “Do Gwen and Lancelot know yet? What about Mordred?”

“Lancelot and Gwen aren’t due until afternoon,” says Freya, straightening and meeting his eyes. “They can’t do much, but we’ll update them. Actually, it might be wise to ask them to go up north, in case the people from the city need to get out of the country quickly. Mordred won’t like it, but they can always come back. And Mordred …” She grimaces and shrugs. “He heard it, and he went back in his room and locked the door. We’re going to try to get him out in an hour or so, once we’ve had time to think through things.”

“It’s the first time a rescue has been compromised this badly,” says Merlin, and Arthur bumps his shoulder to stop him looking so shattered. “We were all getting a bit overconfident, I think. And some of the older sorcerers would take care of the children’s ward sometimes. Mordred didn’t mention, but he might have known Sophia.”

“Gwen will help with that. He’ll be less likely to look at her as if he’s threatening bloody death.” That wins a tiny smile from Merlin and a disapproving shake of the head from Gaius. “Look, I trust Gilli just like I trust all of you. I can’t imagine him saying anything, at least nothing true, and certainly not right away, which gives us time to figure out how to get him away. It helps that my--that Uther refuses to use any magic if he can help it, so Gilli won’t have to deal with fending off a truth spell unless he gets desperate.”

“Morgana sent word that she’ll be getting on the radio to everyone, including us, tonight sometime, once she’s wheedled information out of Uther,” offers Gaius, giving Arthur a nod. “Hopefully she’ll figure out where he is and what they plan to do to him so we’ll know exactly how urgent it is to get him out.” He pauses. “Morgause talked to Aulfric, Sophia’s father. We’ve lost his support, it looks like.”

Freya stands up. “I’m going to town.” Merlin looks up at her so quickly Arthur can almost hear his neck creak. He’s a bit shocked himself; aside from Lancelot and Gwen, Merlin’s the only one who’s left the property since Arthur arrived. “I’m going to tell Gwen and Lancelot that we need them, and then I’m going to buy every single paper they’ve got at the store and see who is saying what. Arthur, can I speak to you for a moment?”

Arthur stands up and follows her out of the kitchen, squeezing Merlin’s shoulder on the way and letting her take her purse (which is a bit dusty) out of the hallway before they go outside. “What can I help you with?” he asks when he thinks they’re out of earshot. Chances are Merlin has some way to eavesdrop, but hopefully he won’t.

“Merlin.” He raises his eyebrows in his best imitation of Gaius. “He won’t talk to me about anything, since he rescued me, at least nothing serious, and I doubt he’ll talk to Gaius. Lancelot could maybe help, but he’ll be worrying about Mordred. So that leaves you.”

“He’s been through a great deal already. Of course he’s upset, Gilli’s a friend, but he’ll be okay.” Arthur winces at how completely insincere he sounds, especially since Freya’s known Merlin her entire life. “What do you think he’ll need from me?” he tries instead.

“I’m not a very good Seer, so I intend to ask Morgana when we can get some privacy, but I didn’t have very good dreams last night, and they felt true.”

If Arthur knew her better, he might offer her some sort of comfort like he’s sometimes done for Morgana. Instead, he just nods. “I won’t press you for details. Morgana never liked giving them either, until she was sure. But I’ll try to help him. Are you going to be okay in town?”

Freya smiles at him. “I’ll be fine. I’m not quite as helpless as my brother makes me out to be, you know, and Gwaine at the shop has made deliveries to us a few times when Merlin’s been ill. He’ll help me if I need help.”

“I’ll see you in a while, then,” says Arthur, and turns to go back inside.

Merlin and Gaius are arguing quietly about the implications of losing Aulfric’s support when Arthur gets back to the kitchen, but Merlin stops long enough to give him a curious look when he comes in. “Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine for now, and we’ll talk about things later. You two can go back to your conversation, and I’m going to have breakfast unless you think the discussion could benefit by my insight.”

The two of them exchange looks that make Arthur feel about six years old and draw him into discussion about his father’s friends in the government and how many of them might be swayed while Arthur fries eggs and eats them. He catches Merlin yawning as he finishes up and prods him gently in the side. “What?” Merlin asks, sounding grouchier than Arthur’s heard him.

“We can’t solve the whole world’s problems right now,” Arthur says softly, and Gaius looks pointedly out the window like the yard is absolutely fascinating. “And you didn’t come to bed last night, or I would have woken up. So you’re going to come upstairs and take a nap until Freya comes home, as Gaius and I are perfectly capable of handling anything that arises.”

“Who died and made you king?” Merlin mutters, but he stands up nonetheless. “If you’ll excuse me, Gaius, my nursemaid seems to think I’ll throw a temper tantrum if I don’t get some sleep.”

“We could all use some rest after last night,” says Gaius. “Both of you boys go upstairs.” Arthur opens his mouth to remind them that he, unlike everyone else, actually had a full night’s rest. “Just don’t ward the room,” he continues, “and I’ll call you if anything happens.”

Arthur decides not to object and takes Merlin’s elbow to lead him up the stairs.  
*  
“Are you going to tell me what you talked to Arthur about earlier?” Merlin asks Freya the second he can get her alone. It’s been a long day of useless, circular conversations around the kitchen table, none of them close enough to the action to be of any use but everyone want to do something. At the moment, they’re all taking a break while Gwen and Lancelot fuss over Mordred and Arthur and Gaius talk to Morgana on the radio, since she’s just called and asked to speak to them first.

Freya looks around before climbing a few stairs of the staircase and sitting down, gesturing for Merlin to sit down with her. “I just told him that you won’t let me look out for you and that he should do it, Merlin. Really, I’m your sister. You should have expected that I would want to talk to him at some point.”

Merlin remembers when he was sixteen and going on his first date with Will, and Freya at fifteen, just as shy and sweet then as she is now, taking Will into the next room to help with the tea while Merlin negotiated his curfew, and how Will came out looking a bit terrified and hardly touched him the whole night. “You don’t need to defend my honor,” he says, smiling up at her.

She rolls her eyes, and for a second it’s like the past two years never happened. “I don’t think anyone in this house has any illusions about your honor.” After he pretends to be offended and staves off a blush, she sobers again. “I’ve had a few visions lately, Merlin, that’s all. I don’t know any details so I didn’t want you worrying about them too much, which is why I told Arthur first.” He opens his mouth and she shushes him. “I’m going to ask Morgana, and other than that, I’ll tell you when I know something for sure and not before.”

“Are you okay, though?” Freya never has the good visions, at least not that she tells him. Everything, she’s always said, is murky and disjointed, but she dreams deaths and sadness--their mother’s death, his messy breakup with Will. He sometimes wonders if she saw her imprisonment before it happened.

Freya musses up his hair and stands. “I’m not as fragile as you think I am, you know. I’ll be fine here once you and Arthur go back to the city.” Merlin stares at her and tries to find the words for all the objections he has to that. “Let’s go back to the kitchen,” she says before he can voice any of them. “I imagine Arthur and Morgana have started sniping at each other by now.”

Sure enough, when they go back to the kitchen, Gaius is looking long-suffering and Arthur is shouting about someone named Leon while Morgana laughs at him. Merlin cuts across the conversation when Arthur starts getting red in the face. “Fay, hello. Have you got news for us?”

Freya goes back down the hall towards Mordred’s room and starts a quiet conversation with Lancelot and Gwen.

“A lot of it, and very little good, I’m afraid. Hello, Dragon. Is everyone else there? Wart has been monopolizing me.”

“We’re collecting ourselves.” He sits down next to Arthur and takes his hand when he reaches out. “You’re still safe where you are, then?”

“Yes. Pendragon doesn’t suspect a thing, which is why I have all the intel at the moment.” Freya appears at the door, Lancelot behind her, making gestures that mean that Gwen has decided to stay with Mordred for the time being. Merlin motions them in to sit at the table. “Everyone else has mostly gone to ground. I won’t say where exactly, we can’t be too careful even on the scrambled channels. Manticore and I are the only ones whose faces aren’t plastered all over the city.”

Merlin bites back a smile, as he always does, at Alice’s chosen nickname, and feels Arthur do the same next to him. “It’s good that she’s safe. What can you tell us about Sophia and Gilli?”

They’ve all looked at the papers Freya brought home and the news doesn’t look good. Some of the papers have something close to the truth: they mention Sophia’s attempt to control a man’s mind and how she was sent to prison but ended up at Pendragon Corp. They talk about how Morgause and Gilli and others are upstanding members of the community. They talk about how Sophia was killed by bullets, not by magic. Too many, though, have articles about terrorism and Sophia being an innocent victim of people kidnapping her from a facility where she wanted to be, about government meetings. Far too many mention Arthur’s supposed death as well. “Much as Pendragon is trying to make her look like an angel, her trial was well-publicized, what with who her father is. As for Gilli …”

That pause means nothing good. Merlin tries not to squeeze Arthur’s hand too tight, but judging by Arthur’s sharp look, he fails. He doesn’t much care, though, because he needs something to hold on to; he knew Gilli before he knew anyone else in the underground, and it’s hard to imagine him captured, probably tortured. “What about Gilli?” Arthur asks, eyes on Merlin’s face.

“Judging from a few comments, I suspect that he’s in the hidden basement that he moved the others from, but that he isn’t being treated as … humanely as the others were.” Humane, being locked up like animals and forgotten about because Uther either cared about them too much to torture them or wanted them as trophies. “Pendragon intends to get information any way he can, and he’s figured out that Gilli knows a great deal.” She pauses, and Merlin knows he isn’t going to like what he hears next. “I suspect that the first questions he’s going to ask are about the safehouse. He’s been searching for it for quite some time.”

“It might be time to move it,” says Lancelot. “I know this is an ideal spot, but people in the town have got to at least suspect what’s going on out here. If Pendragon presses …”

Merlin doesn’t care much where he is, and everyone else is only meant to be temporary (for all Arthur doesn’t feel that way) but he knows Freya loves the house, and the view of the lake, and the woods. She doesn’t even flinch, though, before she speaks. “Let us know if it becomes necessary. It might not be wise right away, though, especially if some of the people in hiding fall out of contact. They have to know where they can go and with nowhere in the city safe …”

“Let’s hope Gilli doesn’t give any information, then,” says Morgana. “If worse comes to worse, I know he knows …”

Nobody knows what to say to that. They all know what the protocol is for if they’re caught and the torture gets to be more than they can handle, but the thought of any of them having to do it makes Merlin want to take them all away somewhere they can be safe, even though he knows they’ve got to stay and fight. “Have you got any idea if we can get him out?” Merlin asks.

“It was hard enough getting into the basement the first time. Now?” Morgana sounds grim. “If there’s a miracle, maybe.”

Arthur leans forward. “We don’t need to get pessimistic yet. It’s been less than twenty-four hours and we’ve got to keep thinking. For now, though, I think we’re all in some shock and we have a child here refusing to leave his room because he can hear how upset we all are when he’s outside it. So, Fay, is there anything you need from us tonight?”

“Probably not. For all time is of the essence, we need another day or two to regroup and I need more information before we can even think of getting Gilli out.”

Freya clears her throat. “In that case, Fay, may I speak to you in private for a few minutes? I want to consult on something.” When Morgana acquiesces, she picks up the radio and walks out towards the shed. Merlin resists the urge to follow her or eavesdrop.

Arthur stands and tugs him to his feet, which is even more of a distraction. “Come on. Let’s leave the others to coax Mordred out and have the evening to ourselves. He’ll run screaming the second he hears whatever’s on your mind.”

“You are insatiable,” Merlin says, trying to sound annoyed, but he’s smiling, and he thinks that was probably Arthur’s point.  
*  
Arthur doesn’t know what wakes him up, not because it’s silent, but because there are at least three sources of noise. From somewhere downstairs, the radio is shrilling the “emergency” tone in an endless wail that could have started when he started awake or hours ago. From down the hall, Freya is screaming. And someone is pounding on the door.

Merlin is bolt upright in bed, unmoving but eyes wide open, and Arthur sits up next to him, presses a soothing kiss that they don’t have time for into his shoulder. “You get Freya, I’ll get the door, Gaius is closest to the radio.”

That seems to be the cue Merlin needs to stand and trip over himself rushing for the door to their room, and Arthur grabs his gun from the drawer of the nightstand because they don’t know who’s knocking on the door but in the middle of the night three days after Gilli’s capture it can’t be anything good. He pulls on boxers--he thinks they’re Merlin’s, too fucking tight, but he doesn’t much care--and half-falls down the stairs, nearly running into Gaius in the hallway. “Should we--”

“You get the radio, I get the door,” says Arthur, and makes sure the safety is off his gun.

It’s Lancelot, so he lowers the gun, but it’s still not good, when Freya’s sobs carry through the whole house and Morgana’s voice is shrieking indistinctly from the radio, and he isn’t the least bit surprised when Lancelot says “The town is swarming with people asking after you and showing all of your pictures around, and they don’t look like they’re official government. You’ve got to pack up.”

“Do you think we can get away before they get here?” Arthur asks. “With nowhere to transport to?”

“Probably not.,” says Lancelot, which is at least honest. “Gwen is with her father, and there’s a place where Mordred could hide.”

“Good, at least he’ll be safe. Go get him.” Arthur steps out of the way and shuts the door and runs up the stairs because he refuses to die wearing nothing but pants that don’t fit. He meets Merlin in the hall. “Lancelot is here. Pendragon Corp security is all over town. We’ve got to get out.”

“Uther is with them. We don’t make it away in time,” says Merlin flatly.

“Then we fight him.”

Merlin’s face softens and he starts pulling them down the hall towards his room, where all of Arthur’s few possessions have managed to migrate. “You don’t have to. After all this, he’s still your father.”

Gaius is talking to Lancelot downstairs, and then Mordred is yelling, refusing to go. “Doesn’t matter,” says Arthur, grabbing his own clothes and putting them on fast, the t-shirt backwards and his shoes without socks. “You said it yourself. You’re my family, all of you here.”

“Don’t you dare get killed.” Merlin’s voice is tight, choked, and when Arthur looks at him his eyes flash and a quick rush of power wraps around him and just as quickly disappears. “Come on. We’ve got to be ready.”

They get downstairs just steps after Freya, and Gaius is waiting. “He forced one of them to put a truth spell on Gilli and got our location.” He sounds unbelievably tired, and Arthur remembers how long Gaius and his father were colleagues and friends. In some ways, it means far more than being the son of such a distant father. “Gilli is dead, Morgana is on the run somewhere in the city, and--”

“I won’t go, I won’t, I _won’t_ \--”

Mordred’s scream rises over Lancelot’s desperate attempts to convince him and Arthur reaches out before he even registers that Merlin’s knees are buckling. Freya is standing at the door to the kitchen, looking lost and scared. Arthur wonders how this dream ended. Wonders if Morgana will be safe tonight. “Mordred,” he snaps, with as much command as he can. “We don’t have time to argue.” Mordred prepares himself to scream more. “If you stay, then you do as we do, is that clear? No heroics, no tantrums, and no getting yourself hurt.”

Freya and Lancelot both object. Arthur shrugs it off and waits for Mordred’s nod and for Merlin to take his own weight back again. This is going to be a joke if they don’t all work together. Arthur’s not trained with a gun, nor is Lancelot, so they’ll have to do their best and rely on the sorcerers. With Freya and Gaius’s strengths elsewhere, Merlin is going to need Mordred’s support to keep them all from getting killed. “What do we do?” Merlin asks.

They look at Arthur, and he’s used to making the best of bad situations and figuring out where to move next. In that much, at least, he’s willing to be his father’s son. “We fight either until we win or you can get us out of here. Lancelot, if you want to go to Gwen, now’s the time.”

Lancelot looks at Mordred. “I’ll stay. Gwen and I both knew it was a risk, coming here, but we had to warn you.”

“Freya, Gaius, I know it’s not either of your forte, but neither is the big stuff that this fight needs, so if you could work out a transport--leave me behind, if you leave anyone, I still don’t think he’ll kill--”

“They’re inside the wards,” says Merlin, then punches Arthur in the arm, hard. “Nobody’s getting left, and nobody’s going to die.” His voice catches. “Nobody else, I mean.”

Arthur pulls him close for a second, all they have time for. “You can protect us. You’re the most powerful sorcerer anyone’s met.”

Merlin’s smile can barely even be called that, and he turns to Mordred. “Don’t kill them, if you can help it,” he says, and Arthur’s about to object before he realizes that no judge would be able to call it anything but murder, even if it was in self-defense, and that none of them will be able to make a difference from jail. “Put them to sleep, stun them, trap them in wards, but don’t kill them.”

It takes Mordred just a second too long to nod his agreement, but there’s no helping that.

“They’re getting closer,” says Freya. “Better to meet them outside, or we’ll take the house apart board by board fighting them.”

Gaius takes her arm. “We’ll go to the shed before they get here, my dear, and work on that transportation spell. Mordred, keep your shields down. I’ll contact you when we get something set up.”

They go out the back way, after Freya quickly kisses Merlin’s cheek and whispers something in his ear, and the rest of them go out the front. Arthur lets Merlin step out in front of him, though Lancelot seems to have trouble letting Mordred do the same. He has no illusions that it will be him who saves the day.

Arthur knows the men (his father) are getting closer because Merlin’s mouth gets tenser and tenser and Arthur feels the wards around them stronger than he ever does these days, almost screaming with strain. “Let the wards down,” he whispers. Merlin barely looks at him, incredulous. “Let them down, Merlin, trust me, there’s a lot of magic tied up in there and it’s distracting you now that there are enemies inside them. You’ll concentrate better if you don’t have to deal with that.”

Merlin looks at him for just a second, then nods tightly, his eyes going gold. An instant later all of them but Lancelot stagger with the difference in the air. “Let’s hope Freya and Gaius figure out we did that on purpose,” says Merlin, but his eyes are still on the woods.

“Almost here,” says Mordred. “Shields up.”

As if that’s a cue, Arthur hears them. They aren’t exactly making a point of being quiet, even though they’re supposedly sneaking up on a group of powerful sorcerers. His father always underestimates them, which is only to the good.

“About two dozen, with guns,” breathes Merlin. “And Pendragon.”

“He’s smug,” Mordred says, clear as if there isn’t the chance they can be heard. Or maybe he wants to be heard. “He thinks he’s won already.”

Twenty-five against four--six if they count Gaius and Freya--isn’t the odds that Arthur would want, but it’s the odds they have and he has enough faith in Merlin’s abilities not to get nervous. This will be the end of things somehow, certainly the end of ever thinking of Uther Pendragon as his father, and he shifts and cocks his gun. “He’s a fool,” he says to Mordred.

The men come out of the woods.  
*  
Merlin wields sleep.

Mordred is trapping men in solid cones of magic, an explosion of uncontrolled power that he won’t be able to keep up for very long. Arthur and Lancelot are both waiting, biding their time until they know for sure that violence is needed, but Arthur’s gaze is trained beyond the start of the treeline, where Uther must be.

Over and over, Merlin whispers the words he used for his mother when she was too tired and ill to sleep, for Will when he was too jittery to rest when he needed, for Freya when she sat wide-eyed night after night like if she blinked the world would end. It makes him feel sick, watching their knees crumple and their faces go slack, even if he knows they’ll wake rested. If he hadn’t known before that he never wants to kill a man, that not every sorcerer goes bad like Pendragon seems to think they do, this would be enough proof of it.

“Duck,” whispers Arthur, and he does, letting Arthur sink a bullet into the leg of a man who keeps dodging both Merlin’s and Mordred’s spells. The man yells, starts hobbling, and Merlin puts him to sleep.

“Let them breathe, Mordred,” Lancelot is saying, and Merlin realizes for the first time that the cones aren’t designed to let air in, though he doesn’t know if Mordred did it on purpose. He thinks the right spell as hard as he can, a barrier that won’t kill them, and feels Mordred pick it up. _No deaths,_ he reminds him silently.

The soldiers--they may not be from the government, but soldiers they are nonetheless--don’t have that restraint. Maybe they believe in what Pendragon Corp does and maybe they don’t, but they’re certainly being paid by it, and apparently their orders aren’t to capture, because they’re shooting to kill. Merlin waves off the bullets with little effort and concentrates on making them sleep. It’s harder when they don’t want to.

“How long does the sleep spell hold? Long enough to get away, or negotiate?”

“I think so.”

“Trust me, then. Or they’ll keep shooting, and you can’t do everything on your own.” Merlin nods, and is about to ask what Arthur’s planning when Mordred snaps his head to look at them and Arthur raises his voice. “We know you’re here, Father.”

Merlin winces, not liking the way Arthur sounds saying the word when he’s been avoiding it, and puts someone else to sleep. Mordred is struggling to keep his spells going, untrained as he is, so Merlin reaches inside each of his cones and puts the men in them to sleep. Uther Pendragon doesn’t come out of the woods. “It was worth a try,” he whispers in between spells.

“Not finished yet.” Arthur shoots at someone else who’s trying to come around the side, hits an arm. Lancelot, nearby, pulls Mordred out of the way of a bullet. The men left are smart enough to dodge Merlin and desperate enough to shoot a lot. He’ll slip up eventually, under this sort of onslaught, but perhaps Gaius and Freya are close to getting them out. Arthur shouts again. “This is how you honour my mother? Trying to murder her son in cold blood?”

From what Arthur has reluctantly said in their late nights together, any mention of Ygraine Pendragon is a low blow and sure to provoke Uther, though perhaps not in the best way. This time, it certainly brings the man out of the cover of the trees, and everyone on both sides freezes. Merlin wants to cover Arthur in wards, hide him away, keep him from having this conversation, but instead he stands by his shoulder and meets the gaze of the man who’s made all of their lives a misery.

“You dare mention Ygraine after you betrayed me,” says the man, voice utterly level.

“You betrayed her first.” Arthur wraps his hand around Merlin’s, and if Merlin weren’t looking for it he wouldn’t have noticed the flinch when Uther’s eyes narrow. Mordred still isn’t giving him the signal to run, but he wants to go anyway. He could probably get them away through sheer force of will, but Arthur’s got to plan. He’s just got to have faith in it. “I’m not going to reason with you,” Arthur continues. “I think you’ve proven quite a few times that you won’t be reasoned with. I just want to ask what you possibly think you can accomplish tonight. Have us killed, and you won’t be able to cover it up. Don’t kill us, and the story will hit the papers in the morning, and it won’t be flattering.”

He squeezes Merlin’s hand and Merlin realizes that he’s supposed to be doing something. He just can’t guess what. “You’re all criminals, no one will listen to you,” says Pendragon.

“Actually, only Merlin and I are. They’ll listen to the others.”

Whatever Arthur’s plan is, Merlin doesn’t figure it out soon enough to stop one of the soldiers waking up when his concentration slips, taking aim and shooting before he realizes that there’s at least some unofficial ceasefire. The bullet goes through Lancelot’s shoulder, and Mordred screams. And keeps screaming.

Merlin doesn’t bother with finesse; he just rips consciousness away from the man who shot and from any other soldiers still standing. They’ll wake with headaches, but they’ll wake. He’s more worried about Lancelot, crumpling to the ground looking surprised and shirt blooming with blood, and Mordred, screaming and screaming and--reaching out.

“Don’t,” Merlin yells, or maybe it’s Arthur, who somehow seems to have a handle on what’s actually going on and has let go of Merlin to let him go to Lancelot.

Mordred’s wail shapes itself into syllables and he clutches his hand into a fist.

Uther Pendragon falls, and Merlin feels his life wink out.

For a few precious heartbeats, there’s silence. Merlin stares at Pendragon, who looks older in death, and tired, face still as hard and cold as ever. Arthur’s breathing is shaky next to him, Lancelot is choking back cries of pain, and Mordred’s shout cut off into silence abruptly the second he killed Pendragon, leaving him to kneel next to Lancelot with tears running down his face. Merlin should be the one to fix this. He should. Instead, he stands staring until Freya comes around the corner of the house at a run. “We finished the spell, but Mordred wasn’t answering and then we heard some--is that Pendragon?” Her voice goes high. “Is he dead?”

“Lancelot is hurt,” Merlin manages. “Can you get Gaius, please?”

“Is he, Merlin?”

“He’s dead.” That’s Arthur. Merlin looks over at him, finds him staring at his father’s body as well, trembling like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. “We need Gaius.”

Mordred has started murmuring to Lancelot, not spells but pleas that would break Merlin’s heart any other time. “--promised, you promised me I could go live with you and Gwen, you can’t--”

“It hasn’t hit anything vital,” says Lancelot, though Merlin isn’t sure who he’s speaking to. “I’m just losing blood. Freya, could you--?” That gets her to disappear again at a run.

Merlin reaches out with his magic, staunches the flow of blood as well as he can while still maintaining the sleep spell on the soldiers. He needs to put them in stasis somehow until they can be dealt with, but he can’t figure out how to do it right now and he doesn’t know who to tend to first, so he just holds the spells that he can and stays where he is.

Freya and Gaius are quick, and Gaius nods at Merlin as he falls to his knees next to Lancelot, his magic far more experienced at healing and better than anything Merlin could do. He withdraws, gives Freya’s hand a quick clasp as she goes to Mordred, who is watching Gaius and Lancelot with wide, wet eyes.

That leaves Merlin with Arthur, which he wants more than anything, but he doesn’t know if Arthur wants comforting, or if he’ll even admit that he needs it. He turns around completely, so he doesn’t have to look at Pendragon’s body and the others, still alive but under his control, peppered around their yard like so much junk, and meets Arthur’s eyes.

Arthur’s still trembling, verging on shaking, and he just holds his arms out, looking helpless and a bit lost, like the first time they met. Merlin steps forward and into his arms and just holds on, shaking a bit himself. “Are you okay?”

“No,” says Arthur. “Are you?”

“Not really.” There’s too much to do, too much to think of. He’d thought he would be able to celebrate when Pendragon died, but now all he can think is how many people they’re going to have to free, how to get Mordred off a murder charge, what he’s going to do when he goes back to the city.

Arthur pulls Merlin’s head onto his shoulder. “We’ll get through it.” Merlin nods and gives himself a few seconds to breathe. There’s time to take care of everything else. For now, he can just hold on to Arthur and wait for the shaking to stop.  
*  
Morgana seems to have called every reporter in the city for Arthur and Merlin’s return. All Arthur wants is to find a place to sleep, likely his old flat, and drag Merlin there to rest for a week, but of course she has other plans. Everyone wants to talk to them, and they’ve spent the past week at the safehouse talking to various members of the government and the police, convincing them not to arrest Mordred or quell the story that hit the papers as soon as Morgana heard what happened and found a phone. There’s still talking to do, and years of work just to undo the harm his father did, but all Arthur wants to do is rest.

Judging by the look on Merlin’s face when he looks out the window of Alice’s living room, where they’ve decided to hold the press conference, and sees the reporters, he agrees. “Can’t we just send Mordred out there? He’s the one who actually did it, and he’s a kid. The papers are all over him.”

Arthur fixes Merlin’s hair, which he’s been running his hands through ever few seconds since they transported in ten minutes ago. They haven’t even seen Morgana yet, since she’s been in the city setting every single one of Pendragon Corp’s “volunteers” free and finding places to put them all week. “Because Mordred is creepy,” he says as seriously as he can. “And also because he’s the one who actually did the deed, which doesn’t make the anti-magic people very happy. He’s better off with Lancelot and Gwen.”

“I hate it when you’re reasonable,” Merlin mutters in the general direction of the floor, and Arthur kisses him because he can’t not. Merlin melts into him, mouth soft, and Arthur doesn’t think there will ever be a time when this isn’t the best part of his life, even though they’ve hardly been together any time at all.

Morgana laughs softly from the doorway. “You two do insist on giving the papers quite a story, don’t you? If you do that during the press conference, we’ll get every housewife in the country on our side.”

Before she can finish whatever clever speech she is surely preparing to give them, Arthur pulls away from Merlin with one last kiss to his temple and strides across the room to wrap her in the tightest hug he can manage. She doesn’t laugh then, just hugs back just as tight. “A little scandal will be good for them,” he says when he trusts his voice again.

“It will be very good for us all.” Arthur pulls away far enough to look at her properly. She looks tired, of course, like they all do, but not the same way she does when she has the nightmares that leave her shaky and wretched. This is the simple exhaustion from the fact that Pendragon Corp is hers now, since Uther changed his will hours after he saw Arthur on the security footage, and that she’s technically in charge of putting it all to rights. “Might take their minds off the fact that we intend to change things pretty drastically quicker than anyone will like.”

Arthur lets Morgana go. “That’s why it will be good for them,” she says, squeezing his biceps one last time and turning to give Merlin a quicker hug. “It’s so good to meet you properly.” Greetings done, she steps away and smooths her jacket down. “The others are all here and safe, as I’m sure you know, and Alice says she’s making dinner for all of us tonight so we can talk together before we move on to whatever comes next.”

Before Mordred goes with Lancelot and Gwen to their little inn in the north to get out of the public eye, and before Morgana (and probably Morgause and Gaius) starts to figure out what to do with Pendragon Corp. Before Arthur and Merlin figure out what the hell to do with themselves. “When do we have to be out there?” Merlin asks, giving Arthur a sidelong look that says his attempt to look nonchalant isn’t fooling him in the least.

“I’ll go out and give some preliminaries, give you two a last few seconds to prepare yourselves.” She fusses with Arthur’s shirt for a few seconds. Neither he nor Merlin is particularly dressed up, but he’s not a CEO’s son any longer so he doesn’t much care. “We’re not lying about anything. It’s not worth the risk or the effort at this point. If they haven’t arrested us for breaking about a million laws already when we’ve cheerfully admitted it to the police, I doubt they’ll do it now.”

“Terribly comforting as always, Morgana,” Arthur says, and tugs her hair just because he knows she hates it. “Go out there and dazzle them with your cleavage so they won’t pay attention to a thing we say,” he adds, because he knows that will make Merlin choke on a laugh.

“I should have told them to arrest you,” she says without heat, and sweeps out of the room.

Arthur gives her thirty seconds to get down the hall and out of earshot before he turns to Merlin, who is looking more nervous than he did while they were waiting for the bullet to come out of Lancelot’s shoulder. “Will it make you feel better if you put a protection spell on us before we go out there?” he asks without preamble. Merlin’s done it every time they talked to someone new in the past week, just in case, but they hadn’t discussed it for this. With sorcerers in the audience they’ll practically be glowing with it, and people will wonder why they need to protect themselves, but if Merlin needs to then they’ll do it.

“It would make me feel better, but I won’t. I actually much prefer living without being under wards all the time, it’s just taking me a while to get used to it.”

“There are quite a lot of people here who can protect us if we need it.” Arthur gives him a quick kiss and stays close. “We’re going to be okay, sweetheart.”

That makes Merlin snort out a laugh, then raises his eyebrow-- _sweetheart, really?_ \--in silent scorn. Arthur grins back, and Merlin kisses him and stands back, looking calmer but no less serious. “I love you, you absolute arse.”

Arthur can hear Morgana talking to the sea of reporters outside, so he can’t give that the attention it deserves. It’s not that he doesn’t know it, that Merlin doesn’t realize Arthur loves him as well, but they both know it’s more than a bit mad to be thinking it, let alone saying it, after so little time. “I love you too. Are you going to be a bit calmer now?”

Merlin squints at him, though he can’t entirely hide his grin. Arthur steps away and makes sure one last time that they’re presentable before taking his hand. “Someday,” Merlin grumbles, “I will wring some sort of emotion out of you that you don’t feel the need to follow up with being a patronizing bastard.”

“It will be something to look forward to,” Arthur agrees, and hauls him down the hallway, nodding at Alice as they pass, and out the front door, where they interrupt the end of Morgana’s speech (which he couldn’t have planned better if he tried) and are immediately met by flashes, shouts, and the sound of dozens of cameras going off.

“And here they are,” says Morgana dryly, sounding more amused than annoyed, and gestures them up onto the makeshift podium she put together. “We’ll answer your questions as best we can, ladies and gentlemen, but please be patient.”

Merlin relaxes his hold on Arthur, but Arthur just tows him along behind him, enjoying the murmurs that start the moment their audience figures out exactly what’s going on. He takes a deep breath, though, and doesn’t do anything shocking, because that won’t help their cause. Instead, he keeps hold of Merlin’s hand and puts on the persona he learned from years in the spotlight, one of the few legacies Uther left him that he’s grateful for. It will be a while, if ever, before he’s out of the public eye.

Morgana steps aside when they arrive with a glance that promises pain if he does anything stupid, and a look at Merlin proves that he’s looking a bit shell-shocked and startled, which Arthur should have expected, since Merlin’s social circle hasn’t exactly been large in the past two years and his life was quiet before that. Arthur steps a bit in front of him, which gets him a dirty look, and starts taking questions.  
*  
Merlin looks up when Arthur sighs and finds him rubbing his temples. That means, he’s discovered in the three days they’ve been going through every paper and file in Uther Pendragon’s office, that he’s seen something else horrifying, some other “experiment” or plan for one written out in calm, scientific language. “Do you think Morgana will have us arrested if we burn her building down for the insurance money?” asks Arthur, not entirely joking. “We could use it, after all.”

“We can do it after we’ve gone through the papers,” says Merlin, eyeing the stack of financial documents he’s been going through. “But if we do it now, we lose all chance of figuring out where he moved my father and Nimueh.”

“We do find them,” Arthur says, looking up and meeting Merlin’s eyes. Merlin just nods; Freya and Morgana both agree on that, as do several other seers they’ve asked. He doesn’t bother saying that it could change if they burn the building down, because of course Arthur already knows it. “I still think that Aredian’s our best lead, but there’s no way we’ll get close to him or to figure out where he’s locked them up while he’s still railing so publicly against everything we’re trying to do.”

“I don’t like the sound of Cenred, either.” Merlin waves one of the investor dossiers nearby. Arthur’s stuck him with most of the bureaucratic documents and seems to be looking at the ones from research and development out of some bizarre sense of punishment. “He’s supporting us in the government, yes, but it’s a bit too quick a switch, and he’s oily.”

“And also he flirts with you.” Merlin rolls his eyes. “He does, Merlin, you cannot possibly be that oblivious. Not as much as he does with Morgause and Morgana, mind you, but he does.”

“It’s irrelevant. I don’t trust him anyway.” Arthur mutters something that Merlin decides not to ask about, since they are supposed to be working, and goes back to staring at whatever he’s looking at, looking a bit sick. “We can switch for a while,” he offers. “You have more experience with this sort of thing, anyway.”

Arthur’s mouth thins. “I would love to, but we won’t get any information about Nimueh and Balinor from these files if you incinerate them with your mind.” Merlin opens his mouth, and Arthur shakes his head. “You absolutely would. I don’t like doing this, but until Morgana gets a little less busy or she finds someone else to go through these, I’ll do it.”

Merlin puts down his papers. They’re due a break anyway. “Arthur. You do realize that you don’t need to protect me from anything, don’t you?” He makes a note to apologize to Freya when he calls her tonight, if she ever felt like he has the past few days, like someone he loves doesn’t see him clearly enough to let him do everything he can.

“Of course I do.” Merlin blinks at him, and Arthur rolls his eyes. “Believe it or not, I am aware that you can take on anything you want to take on. I watched you fight, and even if I didn’t I know how powerful you are.”

“I don’t mean protecting me like that,” he says, trying not to be frustrated.

Arthur stands up from where he’s been sitting at Uther’s old desk and comes to crouch next to the sofa where Merlin has set up camp. “As if you don’t do it to me, Merlin. Hiding papers and changing channels and sending people away every time someone anti-magic tries to say I’m betraying my father’s memory.” Merlin bites his lip. “Yes, exactly. And I can’t even remind myself that I can blast people to atoms to keep from feeling emasculated.”

Merlin sighs and lays back on the sofa, even though stacks of papers dig into his back and he’ll probably drop them all over the floor when he straightens. “It was never going to be easy, getting used to things back in the city,” he says. “I hadn’t even factored you in.”

“We’ll work it out, though.” _We have to_ goes unspoken, but it’s there. Even if Freya and Morgana (who, frighteningly enough, get along like a house on fire) didn’t smirk now whenever they see them, Merlin thinks he would know that he and Arthur aren’t giving up on each other any time soon. “We’ve got time for that. And if you really want, we can switch off on who looks at what papers sometimes as long as you promise not to imagine all of that happening to Freya or Gilli or anyone else it didn’t happen to.”

“Can we take a break for now?” Arthur makes a show of looking at his watch. “We’ve been working since seven this morning,” Merlin points out, “and we worked until eleven last night. We really need to bring in some other people to help us with this, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”

“Probably. I just don’t trust anyone who worked for Pendragon Corp before and everyone from the underground is tied up doing other things at the moment.”

“A lot of the ‘volunteers’ will be looking for work soon. They can help.” Merlin tangles his fingers in Arthur’s hair when Arthur sits on the floor with his back to the sofa, probably on top of yet another stack of papers. Perhaps their first order of business after their break should be to organize what they’ve already gone through. “Morgana said last night that she’s looking for someone to help them all get used to the world again, maybe help those of them whose families sent them or who lost theirs find job placements. I think I might do that, once we find other people to do this.”

Arthur hums and leans into his touch. “You’ll be good at that. It’s what you and Freya have been doing for years, anyway.” Merlin nods, even though Arthur can’t see him. “Morgana is trying to convince me to go into politics.”

“It isn’t urgent that you find something to do right away,” says Merlin instead of saying that he agrees with Morgana, which will just make Arthur glare. Perhaps not yet, but in a few years Arthur is going to want to change the world properly and they’ll have the support by then. “Besides, didn’t you offer to be my assistant at some point? I ought to hold you to that.”

As he’d hoped, that makes Arthur flail a bit behind him to smack Merlin on the arm, and when Merlin peeks, he’s smiling. “I’ll staple papers and schedule meetings all you like, as long as you can think of the proper rewards to keep me from getting bored.”

Merlin tugs on Arthur’s hair until he puts his head back and looks at Merlin upside-down, then can’t resist twisting and bending to kiss him, sideways and messy and obstructed by Arthur’s smile. “Will that do as a reward?” he asks when he straightens back out.

“It’s a good start, at least.” Arthur scowls at his lap, and Merlin moves, messing up papers shamelessly, until he can get a good look at his face. “We’ve got a lot yet to do,” he says when Merlin looks at him expectantly.

“We’ll get it done, though.” And they will. They’ll find Nimueh and Merlin’s father soon because they’re both determined to do it, and because Gaius is working on it as well, when he isn’t examining patients to see what damage he can fix. They’ll take care of whoever was holding them despite the police calling for their release, even if it is Aredian or Cenred. They’ll clean up the rest of the mess that Uther Pendragon left for his son and goddaughter. Morgana will likely see through her plans to reopen Pendragon Corp as a proper research facility, not to try to neutralize magic but to study it. They’ll all figure things out, and maybe eventually magic will get the acceptance it deserves.

For now, though, Merlin looks at the stacks and stacks of papers that they’ve stared at far too much in the past few days and decides that none of that is going to happen today. “We’re going home,” he says firmly.

Arthur pulls away from his touch to turn around and object. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. We haven’t even gone through half of these files, and I don’t know what Aredian or Cenred or whoever is getting up to with out--”

“You haven’t slept more than four hours in one go in more than a week,” says Merlin, sitting up and predictably dislodging papers from the sofa. Arthur glares at him half-heartedly. “And neither have I. This whole thing isn’t on our shoulders, and if we get any more tired we’ll miss things. So come on, we’ll go to your flat--”

“Our flat,” Arthur corrects, even though they’ve been in town less than a week and Arthur lived in the flat for years before he had to flee.

“The flat,” Merlin compromises, “and we’ll take a nap, and call our sisters, and see what we can plan from there.” He stands and hauls Arthur to his feet. “We’ve got time.”

Arthur nods, and Merlin knows he’s going to get lectured on everything in the world that needs fixing the whole way home, but he doesn’t mind. They’ll get to it all eventually. Between he and Arthur, there’s no way it won’t happen someday.


End file.
